On Thu, Sep 07, 2000 at 05:31:37PM -0400, Bennett Todd wrote:
> 2000-09-07-17:11:50 Dan Sugalski:
> That's certainly possible, but since the reason we're gathered here
> together working on trying to launch perl6 is a collective belief
> that perl5 has become unmaintainable for further development, [...]
and the reasons for that lack of maintainability are *entirely* due to
the codebase, *NOT* tools used to maintain that codebase.
> > [...] given how many branches are active, perforce seems to be a
> > win.
>
> Given that it's only available to people who happen to run supported
> platforms,
OK. That pegged the fud-o-meter. The list of supported platforms
listed on http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html is hovering
around fifty, including boutique architectures for Linux, NetBSD
and FreeBSD, as well as three versions of VMS, two architectures
of BeOS, Amiga OS, four versions of Solaris/SunOS, [...]
So, to summarize:
1) Perl6 development will be *open* to anyone able to diff,
patch and send/receive those patches.
2) A very small number of developers will have write-access
to the master Perl6 repository. This is comparable to most
other open source projects using BitKeeper, CVS or Perforce.
3) Those developers prefer Perforce and should not be forced
to use CVS because non-committers prefer it.
4) Perforce clients are *freely available* and *supported*
on a wide range of platforms. No, it's not open source,
and that is regrettable.
5) The use of Perforce is a pragmatic choice. If the requested
features *were* available with CVS, then CVS would be used
instead of Perforce.
6) An anon CVS interface to the Perl6 source tree should be made
available for public consumption, synchronization, etc. How
this is implemented is left as an exercise for those with
the tuits. [*]
Is there anything more to be said about Perforce vs. CVS that *isn't* FUD?
Z.
*: Sarathy tells me that Perforce sucks at maintaining thousands of
anonymous checkouts, while CVS doesn't mind at all. This is a
perfect reason to use anon CVS vs. Perforce, but does not require
that Perforce be ditched in favor of CVS, only that an anon CVS gateway
be maintained.
