Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[Curt Sampson <cjs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 2010-01-15 07:15 +0000 (Fri), David Holland wrote:

> Well, I think we've already decided to move to anything we can find
> that we can make serve our purposes adequately.

Ha! :-)

Ok, the "ha" is a joke, but I was under the impression that we've
"decided" to bog ourselves down doing nothing but arguing. But did I
miss a mandate from core or something like that saying that, could the
technical problems be overcome, Git is acceptable?

>  > Well, I believe that part of that is because we'd actually, in our heart
>  > of hearts, made decision a), because we would not accept anything that
>  > didn't work exactly like CVS for all existing features.
> 
> And (as one of the leading people who keeps coming up with this
> result) I don't think this is true. I've been using Mercurial for
> about three years for (now nearly all of) my own projects, and I
> wouldn't voluntarily go back to CVS.

Oh, I'm the same for Subversion since about five years ago, and Git now.
If I never touch CVS again I couldn't be happier.

But in 15 years with the NetBSD project, I've learned that there are
always people out there who will violently protest the loss of a single
small, hardly-used feature, even if we get a hundred new and better
features in exchange. Or even a change that doesn't lose functionality,
such as:

> Hash codes for version numbers does get some resistance. This is one
> of those things that's probably worth just sucking up, though....

I entirely agree that it's "worth sucking up." The problem is, a lot of
people won't, I expect. (I could be wrong here.)

So the basic summary is: if we're really over the hump where git has
been mooted as acceptable by enough developers that the naysayers are
not going to be able to stop it, and people really are fine with things
like hashes for version numbers, what I'm proposing we do is done.

In which case, post a note to developers@ and say, "The project to
move NetBSD from CVS to get is moving along nicely, and these are
the issues remaining to deal with. We hope to get them solved over
the next year or so and then start the conversion."

I'm not sure if I'll enjoy reading the result of that or not. :-)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs%cynic.net@localhost>         +81 90 7737 2974
             http://www.starling-software.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it.    --George Bernard Shaw