[M3devel] CM3 services and Elego support, was: Re: conversion to another version control system

[Jay K]

 > We're not a shop at all in the sense that you can buy anything from our shelves


"Shop" has a different meaning in this context.
English is wierd.


Roughly speaking "an X shop" is a "company that tends to use product X or products from company X, not necessarily to the exclusion of others"
"a Microsoft shop"
"a Java shop"
"a Unix shop"
"an Oracle shop"
"a .NET shop"


 > And we don't really need more than CVS offers.
 

A few things bug me.
The number one is that there are no change lists, just multiple independent changes to independent files.
I want to be able to browse history as a list of changes, and click on them, not navigate to each file individually.
I would also like a system that keeps enough local state so that I can diff my local version against current
without going to the slow unreliable network. The network is indeed very slow and unreliable.


Perforce seems ideal in so many ways. Its command line interface is excellent.
Its gui is very good.
Its feature set is excellent.
Its branching support is excellent.
I don't know if it has good offline support though.


I think I would settle for SVN.
Though SVN has completely broken branching last I checked, and they acknowledged it.
SVN also has relatively large dependencies to build from source.


I would also like a system that doesn't drop files/directories all over the place. Just in the root of a checkout should
suffice and be ideal. CVS is awful here and I believe SVN is too.


Perforce maybe doesn't have the portability I'd like -- e.g. I don't see OpenBSD.
But that might be an ok compromise, if copying can be done, or if those platforms can be requested.
It seems they are extremely extremely portable but just don't bother to provide the binaries.
Through time they do have excellent platform coverage.
I'm sure we don't go for this, but I do recommend it wholeheartedly.


I want a system that makes me do *something* before editing a file.
  Run some command to acknowledge I'm editing it, so it can keep track.
I want a systerm with a command to undo the edits. With CVS I delete and update. Lame.
I want a system that quickly knows which files I have changed.
Perforce meets all these requirements.


When I'm lazy I do:
  p4 edit ... 
  spend a while editing 
  p4 revert -a  to revert anything I didn't actually change 
  It is wasteful, but plenty fast. 


I'd prefer a system that knows how to use windiff or some other decent gui to show diffs.
I've gradually become comfortable with textual diffs.
But I like gui diffs. Windiff is nice. Some people think it is old and limited, but it is
much better than textual diffs.


CVS handling of merges and conflicts is also very poor.


 - Jay

----------------------------------------
> Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:15:44 +0200
> From: wagner at elegosoft.com
> To: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: [M3devel] CM3 services and Elego support, was: Re: conversion to another version control system
>
> Quoting Darko :
>
> > I sort of meant software support. But isn't this all academic since
> > Elego is a CVS shop and they host the project?
>
> No. Elego is no CVS shop. We're not a shop at all in the sense
> that you can buy anything from our shelves. We help other companies
> improve their development processes wrt. software configuration
> management. Actually, almost all our work in the recent 2 yours
> has been Subversion-related. For more information of what we do,
> have a look at our web pages at http://www.elegosoft.com/.
>
> We used CVS for M3 at the start because it was the only reasonable
> possibility several years ago.
>
> I always opposed a switch of the system because it will bind a lot
> of resources we could use better, e.g. for improving the debugging
> support, IPv6 support, writing a C backend, etc. And we don't
> really need more than CVS offers.
>
> I still doubt that somebody will do all the work to set up a new
> version control infrastructure with easy migration, Hudson and trac
> integration, etc. If anybody sets up something that works better
> than what we have, we will of course use it.
>
> Elego will continue to provide some resources for the M3 project
> in form of CPU time, disk space and administration support if the
> community wants that. And we'll provide git or mercurial or svn
> access for M3 if it is needed. Actually, svn should be rather easy.
>
> We currently have some overload problems with the server that hosts
> CVS and the M3 continuous integration, which led me to reduce the
> number of checkouts and builds. This will be sorted out during
> the fall. Unfortunately, we don't have hard data about i/o needs
> of other systems compared to CVS yet (but we'll get them).
>
> BTW, CI is working quite well now, and produces nightly snapshots
> that can be downloaded for almost all supported platforms, so this
> is better than ever before. See
>
> http://hudson.modula3.com:8080/view/cm3-current/
>
> for details.
>
> Olaf
> --
> Olaf Wagner -- elego Software Solutions GmbH
> Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25 / Gebäude 12, 13355 Berlin, Germany
> phone: +49 30 23 45 86 96 mobile: +49 177 2345 869 fax: +49 30 23 45 86 95
> http://www.elegosoft.com | Geschäftsführer: Olaf Wagner | Sitz: Berlin
> Handelregister: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HRB 77719 | USt-IdNr: DE163214194
>