Re: Moving wip to Subversion

[Ian Zagorskih <ianzag%megasignal.com@localhost>]

That recalls me a rather old local IT anecdote:

Little son comes to his father-programmer and asks:
- Why the sun is rising and falling?
- Hm.. Does it rise?
- Yes
- And does it fall?
- Yes
- Ok, looks like it's working just fine so please do not touch it.

For my new projects I/we prefer Subversion, but pkgsrc and wip already have a 
nicely working infrastructure based on CVS and it "just works" and IMHO there 
are no reasons to break it.

Just my 2cents :)

// wbr

> I agree.  Every time I have dealt with others wanting to move some
> project or another to SVN, I ask the same questions...Why?  What does
> it fix?  What does it gain us?  etc.  In every case, once we cut
> through the bugs which have been fixed and through issues which can be
> fixed with training (either to teach them how to do something, or not
> to do what I have referred to as "Doctor! Doctor!" items), I have had
> these same users fall back to the "Well...Ummmmmm... project XYZ is
> using SVN!".  Well, at that point, I generally find myself having to
> switch gears for a different sort of battle.  First, I ask them what
> they would think if that project deemed that all coding should be done
> with just two fingers, since so many typos occur when fingers press
> the keys out of order?  Or that all coding should be done in assembly,
> or BASIC, COBOL or some other language.  Or that before coding starts,
> a hammer should be liberally applied to the left thumb.  Then, I go on
> to point out that chasing the latest fad does nothing more than waste
> time.  With web apps, it is Java, and many sites have gone through
> learning curves to do what can just as easily be done with plain HTML
> and perhaps some JavaScript for client-side things like validation.
> In this case, we are dealing with source code revision control, and
> SVN seems to be the current "cool" solution in that arena.
>
> I cannot, and I will not say that CVS is perfect, or that SVN does not
> fix some of the defects which CVS has.  Indeed, I wish CVS had the
> ability to have a local repository which essentially stored branches
> off of another repository, and I know other problems/limitations
> exist.  But SVN has its own problems and limitations, such as the
> diskspace issue.  Indeed, last summer, before my father took a fall
> which has resulted in his now living in an assisted living facility, I
> was looking at SVN in some detail to see if there was anything which
> was worth the hits I would take in disk space, performance, etc., and
> found nothing.
>
> In addition, we must realize, as has already been pointed out, that
> pkgsrc has, as one of its major goals, the support for NetBSD.  And
> I do not see either of these moving away from cvs at any point in the
> foreseeable future.  This might change, but probably not in the next
> couple of years.
>
> Besides, for 99.999% of the stuff we do, CVS is not broken, even for
> NetBSD and pkgsrc.  And the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't try
> to fix it.  Because, if you do, you may just find that you have broken
> something else.  One such item would be my pkgsrc tree, which has
> portions of it grafted on from various other repositories, such as
> pkgsrc-wip, my own stuff, and the stuff for a NPO for which I head up
> the IT effort.
>
> So like several others seem to be saying, I would say that unless
> someone could come up with very compelling reasons to move to SVN, my
> response will be to just say NO.
>
> Have fun,
>
> - Doug


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