Re: regarding CVS repository on Savannah

[Tom Lord <lord at emf dot net>]

I would like to add the following to Bradley's comments.  (Unlike
Bradley, I do not speak for the FSF.)

The arch revision control project is now a GNU project, it's "Gnu
arch".

Recent releases of arch have undergone considerable performance tuning
for large source trees, and more tuning is expected.

Mirroring and distributed archives are fundamental to arch -- it is
unlikely that a service interruption at any particular host could
disrupt a large arch-using project.  In the event that a core archive
became unavailable for any reason, activity could simply switch
(relatively seemlessly) to another archive until that core archive
returned.

>From an outsider perspective, the GCC project has long struck me as
one in which the practice of branching and merging are used
aggressively and effectively -- arch, of course, provides uniquely
good support for those practices.

The number of projects using arch has been growing, and there is ample
evidence now of the effectiveness of arch's distribution and branching
features for managing projects.

In response to the events effecting Savannah, we have recently added
features to arch enabling commits to be cryptographically signed and
for those signatures to be easily verified.

Finally, while I've little doubt but that the prospect of a wholesale
conversion of the GCC project to arch is simply too daunting a
prospect to seriously consider or propose, really, the choice is
available for individual developers to make for themselves.  If you
ask on the gnu-arch-users@gnu.org mailing list, it is likely you will
find people willing to help you set up bidirectional CVS <-> arch
gateways because they are experienced in having done so for other
projects.  (Indeed, interesting development is active on tools that
already help to implement such gateways.)

Regards,
-t

Arch maintainer web site mirrors:

     http://arch.quackerhead.com/~lord
     http://regexps.srparish.net/www

and the (slightly out of date because of the cracking difficulties)
project web site:

     http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch