Re: Notes from the version control BOF at the summit

[Florian Weimer <fw at deneb dot enyo dot de>]

* Walter Landry:

>> * The tool must be around for a while, and continue to be supported
>>     We don't want to have to change again, at least not for a while.
>
> Define "a while".  Has svk been around "a while"?

No, it's still experimental technology.  Even tla is still in this
category.

>> * Ability to work offline
>>     For example, the ability to do diffs and examine logs while not
>>     connected to the Internet.  Some systems support doing a commit
>>     while not connected; more on this below.
>
> Is this meant to exclude centralized version control systems?

I don't think so.  It doesn't even exclude CVS.

>> * Language support and character set conversion
>>     A simple case is appropriate line endings for text files.
>
> Are you sure you want this?  Certainly being able to support
> multilingual filenames and data is good.  But to go beyond that and
> start transcoding things in the version control system seems fraught
> with peril.

Line end translation is required, I suppose.

> That is not actually true.  TLA and ArX don't require everyone to have a
> copy of the entire history.

Quite true.  I think this also a requirement.  I don't want to fetch
two gigabytes of history before I can check out the HEAD revision.

[Mainline without a designated integrator]

> TLA and ArX solve this problem by using a patch-queue.  The
> patch-queue account serves as the custodian of the blessed tree.
> People submit merge requests.  If the merge request goes through
> without conflicts, then the blessed tree is updated.  I would imagine
> this sort of system would be easy to rig up for any of the distributed
> version control systems.

It is easy to rig up, but does it work in practice?  Is there any
project with a changeset rate comparable to GCC that uses an automated
patch queue?

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