[CMake] Re: Migration to subversion

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-01-04 07:17-0800 E. Wing wrote:

> My 2 cents.
>
> Distributed [version control system] is the right way to go in my opinion.

I don't completely agree.  Centralized repositories have proved useful for
lots of software development projects (e.g., the 160,000+ free software
projects at SourceForge).  Of course, centralized repos don't work very well
if projects (such as the Linux kernel) have huge numbers of active
developers, but most software projects (such as CMake) will never have more
than a handful of active developers, and for such projects a centralized
repository makes a lot of sense. Thus, it is probably a given that CMake
will always use a centralized repository.

I assume that does not rule out git or Mercurial.  For example, from the
git-svn crash course at http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html, it appears that
git has the capability to use a centralized repository (the so-called bare
repository), and I presume that is the case for Mercurial as well.
So the choice between cvs, svn, git, and Mercurial really boils down to how
impressed the CMake developers are with the particular implementation of a
version control system with a centralized repository.

My own personal experience has been I used CVS for years (at first because
that was all that was available at SF, but then after they deployed the svn
alternative there it was just inertia even though there were many aspects of
cvs I did not like).  However, last year I participated in one project that
used svn, and that nice experience convinced me rather quickly to switch all
my projects to svn because cvs just sucks in comparison with svn.
Currently, I am almost completely satisfied with svn, and I think it would
be an excellent choice for CMake as well.

However, I admit to having no development experience with git or Mercurial.
Is there anything compelling (e.g., fewer bugs, better documentation, more
useful features aside from distributed?) about either over svn for projects 
like CMake that use a centralized repo?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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