[tex-live] svn vs. p4

[Karl Berry]

Meanwhile, the dirs-changed stuff is a detail.  I know from your
separate mail to me that svn is proving extremely painful to you, and if
TL is ever going to make another release, there is no question that you
need to be able to work efficiently.

So what is acceptable to you?  Should we forget about svn and go back to
p4 permanently?  We can do that, but it would be best to decide to do it
now, before any "real" changes have been made to the svn repository.

I myself could be persuaded either way.  Many operations were
significantly more efficient with p4.  P4 keeps track of changes from
the repository itself, so it rarely needs to traverse the repository.

Svn, by contrast, has to do that all the time, since it essentially
keeps information on a directory-by-directory basis.  On our 2gb
repository, this is inherently slow.  I don't know of any other svn
projects nearly this big; gcc is small by comparison.

On the other hand, svn has no licensing issues, and its paradigm is much
more widely familiar to developers.  Perhaps there is a greater chance
that TL could eventually have more contributors with svn.

What do you think?  What do others think?  Perhaps something to ponder
on the way to / at BachoTeX ...

Thanks,
Karl