Re: Aegis [Was: CVS migration to subversion?]

[Peter Bowen <pzb ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 08:32, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Carlos Perell? Mar?n">
> It would be an incredibly controversial shift for GNOME, a massive (and very
> likely unwanted by many developers) step towards "serious software devel
> practices", but might provide some interesting discussion. :-)
> 
>   http://aegis.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Have a read, and maybe spend a few cycles to consider how a large Free
> Software project like GNOME could work with a system like this. :-)

This seems like a very interesting project.  However it looks like that
it doesn't work very well with distributed developers.  Their HOWTO says
you need a shared filesystem with locking.  They suggest NFS, AFS or
DFS.  Alternatively they mention sending changesets over Email, HTTP, or
sneakernet, but this method appears to require sending them to a person
to integrate.  They talk about using external auth mechanisms for this,
and it isn't recommended in the HOWTO, so I don't think that this is a
viable mode for GNOME.

However, this is a very interesting product overall.  I think it could
potentially be a great alternative to proprietary products like
BitKeeper.  From their documentation, they seem to have many similar
features to BK, and, with some work, could become a very viable
alternative to BK.  At the same time the same can be said about
subversion.  I think that both of these systems have features that will
make them superior to CVS, but the real question is which one will get
_all_ the features we need first?

Thanks.
Peter