Re: [Gnumed-devel] subversion

[Roberto Mello]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 11:43:26PM -0500, David Grant wrote:
> Subversion turned 1.0 today.  The website is slashdotted right now 
> though: http://subversion.tigris.org/  But it might be working by the 
> time you get this.  Any thoughts on switching gnumed to use subversion?  
> I don't know much about it, but I thought there was some talk about this 
> a few months ago during the cvs hell period.

Subversion suffers from many of the same central repository problems of
CVS. It does not allow for distributed development, which is a much harder
thing to get done right, but much better in the long run.

BitKeeper, the version control system used by the Linux kernel, allows for
distributed development. The open source alternative that gives us similar
functionality is GNU Arch.

GNU Arch is on its 1.1 release for a while. It has many advantages over
Subversion, especially for projects with developers spread through large
geographical areas such as GNUMed. Plus, Arch is a GNU project, like
GNUMed.

http://www.gnuarch.org/  It has a nice tutorial that is easy to follow
along.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Yasushi_Saito/octopy/ has a graphical
front-end to Arch.

I've been using Arch for my projects for some time now. It is a big step
up from CVS and Subversion. I'd suggest that if GNUMed is going to change
version control systems, that it switches to a all-out better alternative,
instead of just switching to Subversion because of its media attention.

-Roberto

-- 
+----|        Roberto Mello   -    http://www.brasileiro.net/  |------+
+       Computer Science Graduate Student, Utah State University      +
+       USU Free Software & GNU/Linux Club - http://fslc.usu.edu/     +
And God said: E = ½mv² - Ze²/r, and there was light.