Re: hello ..

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec  1, 2002, Pavel Roskin <address@hidden> wrote:

> I didn't know that you also have cvsu!

Except mine stands for a totally different purpose (I just realized
this wasn't clear from my earlier posting).  My cvsu stands for
`run cvs update on any CVS directories you can find within the given
command-line arguments, or within the current directory.´

I've been trying to find a better name for it, but cvsup is already
taken, and I don't like any of the alternatives I could think of.
Any suggestions?

>> Perhaps the solution is for both of us to agree to rewrite everything in
>> Python?

> Sounds like a good idea.  All my development machines run Red Hat 8.0, so
> I have Python 2.2.1 on them.  Python 1.x and 2.x are quite different (e.g.
> with regard to environment variables).  I suggest that we require Python
> 2.x from the beginning.

Sounds reasonable good to me.  Not that I'd mind accepting patches to
get it to work with earlier versions of Python, I probably won't be
able to tell anyway :-)

> I'm quite busy with other things, but I'm ready to spend some time
> on the tools I'm using every day.

I'm not sure I'll ever find the time to get started with this project,
unfortunately :-(  Oh, well

>> But then, subversion is on the corner, and I'm not convinced rewriting
>> these CVS-specific scripts is worth the effort.

> I tried subversion one month ago.  The biggest problem is that it's very
> slow.  "svn update" takes several minutes on a project that includes Linux
> kernel, gcc, binutils, pcmcia-cs and some command-line utilities.

You say it's a local update.  Did you try anything similar-sized on a
local CVS repository.  I do this quite often on a system similar to
yours, and it also takes a couple of minutes.  

> Another problem is that subversion is tied to apache and is harder to
> install compared to CVS, especially for local development, when installing
> CVS doesn't even need root access.

I was hoping they'd have lifted these requirements for local
installations :-(  I haven't followed its development very closely.

> One more inconvenience - subversion keeps base versions in the .svn 
> directories.

Eek.

> On the other hand, if the United CVS Utilities (ucvsu?) is written
> in object-oriented Python, it should be possible to have a separate
> backend for subversion.

Whee!  That sounds like a nice goal.

> They don't provide tools e.g. for checking ChangeLog.  This means
> that CVS Utilities can be useful with subversion some day, and maybe
> even with arch.

Agreed.  They're apparently worth putting effort into, then.  Well,
let's see whether we (or any other volunteers) can come up with
something...

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 address@hidden, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer