Re: Subversion migration schedule (cut-off Fri 18 Mar)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2006-02-11 at 08:07 -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 11:22:47PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Davyd Madeley">
> > 
> > > With that in mind, and since I couldn't find it on the wiki. I was
> > > wondering what reasons we have chosen to go with Subversion over other
> > > popular contenders.
> > 
> > Sucks less than CVS, won't take a lot of relearning, uses very similar model
> > and infrastructure, relatively easy migration, doesn't change our ability to
> > use other systems alongside it.
> 
>   I don't see any doc explaining that. 
> 
> > It's an easy, incremental shift that helps us out in the near term, without
> > getting in the way of testing/using other (more interesting) systems.
> 
>   Easy, good, now how ?

I know the point of your mail isn't actually to ask these questions,
but I'll answer some of them anyways.

> For example I have scripts building cvs checkout tarball automated on
> crontab, how am I gonna do this with the new software without possible
> authentication ?

Non-anonymous authentication is exactly the same as before - SSH.

I don't know Ross's exact plans for anonymous SVN, but it is only a 
few minutes to set up anonymous access to a SVN repository using
mod_svn; it's really trivial to make things available as, say:

 svn checkout http://anonsvn.gnome.org/svn/libxml2 libxml2

>  How are people using the Windows platform be able to
> use it ? 

Windows support for SVN is quite good. You can run the command line
tools, or you can use:

 TortoiseSVN: Windows shell integration for Subversion. Quite slick,
   works great. 

 AnkhSVN: Visual Studio integration for Subversion. (Don't know if
   your users use Visual Studio.) Faintly buggy, not quite as slick
   as TortoiseSVN, but very much usable and the close IDE integration
   is nice to have.

There's also Eclipse integration for Linux and for Windows.

There are a few tricks to getting TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN set up
to integrate nicely with 'putty' for SSH access; those would be
useful to have documented somewhere.

> Same for MacOS ? 

No real experience here, but using SVN from the shell on OS X
should be just about the same as from the shell on Linux.

> Will we still have the equivalent of anonymous
> checkouts ? 

Above.

> What is the equivalent operation of the usual CVS commands that
> the people use now ?

There are quite a few documents on the web explaining this.
(At the most basic level, cvs checkout => svn checkout. 
cvs update => svn update, but not everything is *quite* that
straightforward.)

> At this point I'm just wondering how many of my contributors on my project
> I'm gonna loose instantly, and I don't find this fun at all whatever the
> problems some of you may have w.r.t. CVS, it's hard for me to feel happy
> about this plan.

There's pain in any transition, but CVS => Subversion is about as
low pain as it gets, especially for people who are "consuming" a
project, rather than setting up a new project, figuring out vendor
branches or whatever.

I honestly don't see the distributed version control marketplace as
being well enough organized or mature enough to be worth investigating
yet for a project as large and complex as GNOME, and subversion does 
offer substantial incremental benefits. Not huge benefits, but very
noticeable. So, since Ross has the momentum for doing the transition
to SVN, I don't see any reason to get in the way of that.

A month or so should be plenty of lead time to prepare documentation
to make the transition smooth (and *evening* should be plenty of 
time to prepare documentation to make the transition smooth.) We
just need to make sure that happens early on.

Regards,
						Owen


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