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richardc (1662)

richardc
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Journal of richardc (1662)

Monday April 22, 2002
08:21 PM

the man in the next bed wants your slippers...

[ #4382 ]
Today I have been furthering the cause by having a play with Subversion. Initial feelings are favourable, with a few caveats.

I'm going to handwave over the build process for now, it was a little involved but this is pre-release code. I reckon I could install a new repository from scratch in about half an hour now, and that's mostly compile time.

Here's an overview of things I've found important

  • It has changesets
  • It's free - Apache/BSD style licensing.
  • Committing a changeset is quick, equivalent to commiting the files themselves. With CVS you need to do the commit then a tag, which if you'll remeber is very costly when the size of your project tends towards large.
  • Renames, moves, and removals are properly versioned
  • svn diff is an offline operation.
  • To make svn diff and a few other features work offline it keeps lots more metadata is working directory compared to CVS. Almost 3 times the size of the files alone. I personally think it's worth it, as it allows more hacking to happen offline.
  • The repository is pretty big too. 1692 revisions of bleadperl (51M of files) consumes 1.1G of disk space making CVS look trim at 147M.
  • Those 1692 versions of blead were committed in about 10 hours on a Cyrix MII 266 (522.64 Bogomips); CVS has been chewing over them for 2 days on a 266Mhz G3 PowerBook (532.48 Bogomips), and still isn't done yet.
  • svn import and svn checkout seem to take a while, but updates and commits seem quicker than networked CVS.

More later, if it does anything else interesting.


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  • Subversion definitely looks cool. I also liked the look of arch [regexps.com], and there's even a re-write of arch in Perl! My biggest issue though with arch is that the use of shell scripts kind of ties it to unix platforms (or cygwin, but that doesn't count).

    What I'm really interested to know about svn is how long it will take for supplemental tools to catch up. By that I mean things like cervisia, WinCVS, etc. I doubt very much I could persuade people here to use it unless it had those sorts of tools, being very much
    • I also liked the look of arch

      Cool, I'll take a look and see if it copes with lots of perl sources next.

      My biggest issue though with arch is that the use of shell scripts kind of ties it to unix platforms (or cygwin, but that doesn't count).

      Well legend[0] has it that CVS was once just a collection of scripts around RCS which later got rewritten as an application. Since there's already a rewrite afoot there's nothing explictily stopping this happening to arch, apart from maybe the all-crushing populari

      • Between changesets and decent branching, I plan to jump ship to Subversion as soon as humanly possible.

        I'd love to try BitKeeper, but I try to be a stickler for actual freedom in software licenses so I've been ignoring it, despite the fact that it seems more sophisticated than anything else out there.

        arch scares me, precisely cause it's a giant collection of shell scripts.

        • I've been watching subversion since it was only a few months old. (The worst thing in the world was tigris.org screwed up the mailing list archives where you can't read recent messages conveniently. I won't subscribe -- I've been subscribed to a firehose (P6) before.) Just as soon as 1.0 is out, I'm there.

          Arch is new to me. I like the principle, and it's got one killer feature (IMO) subversion is putting off until 1.x: distributed branches. i.e., if the Perl 6 source code is in a repository I can cre

          --
          J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

          • No sooner do I post this than I find out that Linux can't use bk patches [zork.net]. Chortle.

            --
            J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
          • Yeah, I too think that using BK for the Linux tree is lame. Not much I can do about it since I'm not Linus. Linus is simply one in a long line of technically astute geeks who seems to think that politics are something separate from what they do, despite the fact that it gets shoved in our faces every day (DMCA!) that this is not true.

            A Perl port of arch would be encouraging.

            I like that Subversion is just CVS++ as well, since that's pretty much all I've used except for a brief period of using RCS (ARGH!)

            • Don't knock RCS too much. It was great in its day. I've still got a few things lying around in it; I actually touched one of them this morning. You know, I actually have the O'Reilly RCS book, and it is one of my favorites.

              I think RCS was used as the basis for some commercial tools, too. Sometimes it shows.

              --
              J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
          • The biggest thing I think arch has going against it is its use of ftp as the wire protocol. If they'd have used sftp I'd be much more interested. Though perhaps that's just a matter of changing a few lines in the shell scripts ;-)

            • Erk! I think I knew that in the past, but had forgotten. We might as well just use Expect, telnet, and uuencode. We might as well just post all of our passwords here for public view.

              Why is the world so quick to jump all over "security holes" in operating systems, but so slow to throw out these ancient, broken, insecure protocols?

              --
              J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • ...to the svn people, how huge the metadata is, for example.
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