Re: CVS should die

In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) transmitted:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl> writes:
>> Can this be discussed for 8.1?
>
> It's been discussed, and rejected, several times already.  There
> aren't any alternatives that are enough better than CVS to be worth
> the changeover effort.

Subversion may be getting close to the point where it may be worth
thinking of, and there is a pretty full-featured conversion scheme,
cvs2svn, allowing considerable choice as to what aspects of the CVS
branches will be included.

The one traditional _enormous_ problem with it was that while
much-lauded, it suffered interoperability issues.  People running
different versions of {Debian|RHAT|FreeBSD|...} could have versions
that couldn't talk to one another.  That appears to have been
alleviated:

   "Now that subversion has reached 1.0.0 our compatibility guarantees
   require forward and backward compatible repository formats for all
   patch releases and backward compatible for minor releases.  So
   until 2.0.0 comes out there will be no change that should require a
   dump for upgrading to newer versions."

I'll buy the argument that it'll take some work for people familiar
with CVS to get familiar with SVN.  Of course...

   "Generally, Subversion's interface to a particular feature is
    similar to CVS's, except where there's a compelling reason to do
    otherwise."

I have been watching Subversion develop for quite some time, and have
always felt it the right idea to put usage off because it did not
appear mature enough.  I have always thought "in another year, it may
be ready."  As far as maturity is concerned, it looks like it's there
now.  The formerly compelling reasons for instant rejection are no
longer there.

If it's plausible to run a SVN archive, in parallel, that can accept
patches coming out of the present CVS, it must surely be time for some
intrepid fan of Subversion to put up an an archive and start showing
off how much better it is.  Proving it's viable by demonstration is a
pretty ideal methodology, no?

By the way, one of the longer term goals is for SVN to support a SQL
repository backend; there's probably merit to some "common dogfood
usage" ;-).
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