On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, B. W. Fitzpatrick wrote: > > Henri Yandell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > > > On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Justin Erenkrantz wrote: > > > > > --On Tuesday, November 04, 2003 23:16:50 +0000 Stephen Colebourne > > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > The one potential spanner in the works for me is subversion. When 99% of > > > > the world uses CVS, I really struggle with this one. > > > > > > Have you tried Subversion? It really eases a lot of pain that CVS causes. > > > > Can I use a Subversion server with an existing CVS client? Some kind of > > backwards compatibility bridge thing? > > No, but you can convert your CVS repository to a Subversion repository > using cvs2svn.py (Although it still has some issues with converting tags > and branches, it can convert the trunk very nicely).
My concerns with using SVN are more social than technical. While I think it's pretty clear the SVN is technically superior, it's also pretty clear that substantially more users, contributors and committers are going to be familiar with CVS, and have a CVS tool chain set up and ready to use. Using SVN puts up a barrier (and while not an enormous barrier, it is not a trivial one either) between those potential contributors and their contributions. There's a little hump they'll have to get over. The size of this hump may not be significant for "large" projects, like HTTPD or Tomcat for example, but for tiny little components like those that comprise apache-jakarta-commons and likely apache-commons as well, the hump is as big or bigger than the contribution itself. I think it is likely that many potential contributors will find that hump not worth the trouble, and potential users, contributors and contributions will be lost. What I'd like to see is a larger installed based of SVN *clients*, because I'm afraid too many folks are going to find installing a SVN client to check out, or contribute a small patch to, a tiny commons component more trouble than it's worth. I think the way to get to that installed base is to start with a larger project. Convince a major project to convert to SVN first. (Also, I'll argue that the benefits of SVN are more tangible to larger projects than to tiny commons components as well.) > > -Fitz > > -- > Brian W. Fitzpatrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.red-bean.com/fitz/ > - Rod <http://radio.weblogs.com/0122027/>
