[tex-live] svn vs. p4

[Gerben Wierda]

On 28 Apr 2006, at 02:26, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>> "Gerben" == Gerben Wierda <Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl> writes:
>
>> On 27 Apr 2006, at 06:46, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:
>>> And again, what do others think?
>
>> My personal feeling is that as long as fully free tools are not as
>> good as p4, we should stick with p4. That is purely pragmatic.
>
> I can't disagree but there are a few points to consider:
>
> 1. I had the impression that Karl has never been very convinced that
>    p4 is the best solution.

I think we should let arguments like these out. We are talking about  
merits and drawbacks.

> 2. It seems that the most severe problem is that svn scans the whole
>    tree on the local disk, which consumes some time.  This problem
>    will vanish in a few years when hardware will be faster.  The
>    machine I bought some months ago provides acceptable results.

This argument certainly does not count for me. I keep TeX alive for  
older systems and my main system is as old as possible because newer  
systems are generally downward compatible.

>    Most people prefer svn and I think that in a few years everybody is
>    happier with svn than with p4.  But Karl spent an enormous amount
>    of time to switch to svn the last few months and I don't expect
>    that he is willing to do all this again in a few years if we stick
>    with p4 now.

Again, this is on a good argument to use. First, most people do not  
have the size we have. We should stick to actual merits and  
drawbacks. E.g. speed and license.

> 3. It is possible to overcome some problems by writing some scripts.
>    I just started to write one which runs svn info to determine the
>    revision number of the local repository and then scans svnlog.
>    Some improvements still have to be done to make it useful.

If there is a good and trustworthy technical solution for the  
drawbacks of one system, that counts as an improvement.

> 4. The authors of svn certainly had never such a huge project in
>    mind.  I'm sure that they are interested in our feedback and will
>    improve the system.  What we have to do is to find out where the
>    bottlenecks are.

That is a good point in the OSS world. But I do feel that being  
guinea pig for another project would be a second level arument as best.

> 5. I like svn.

Let's skip that one too. If you can make 3 work, we are one step  
further IMO.

G