version control and LIP

[Ian Lynagh]

(I am not a CVS expert)

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 02:37:52PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:

> It has some small weaknesses, but those are well-known and most
> of them are solved by CVS' "younger brother" Subversion,

Part of the problem is that, like make, the CVS issues can't easily be
fixed by an evolutionary process but are small enough that there is a
lot of resistance against a revolutionary change from people because of
the ubiquitousness of the tools and the ersonal investment people have
made in learning how they work (and how to get around their quirks!).
However, this leads to a situation where we are stuck with the issues
for all time. It seems to me the sensible thing for the long term is to
make the jump.

It has been my experience that switching from CVS to darcs was not any
harder than to subversion despite the latter having a closer philosophy
to CVS, so if you are going to move away from CVS then I would advocate
moving straight to where you want to end up.

Tools and support for the newer players is already appearing, and the
faster people get interested in them and start using them the faster it
will come. This is probably especially true for Haskell people and
darcs.

I think it would be great for the fptools repo to migrate to one of the
new generation at some point in the future, and I think Simon Marlow has
talked about this in the past. For the Haskell community to get
experience with them on these smaller subprojects, both to be ready for
when the change happens and to see which best suits our community, can
only be a good thing IMO.

I also think that getting Haskell used by projects in the Real World is
also a Good Thing, and is worth supporting where possible.

Finally, it is of course possible to synch repositories of the various
systems with CVS. I'm told this is already possible for tla, and it is
being worked on for darcs.


Thanks
Ian