Re: A couple more subversion notes

["Giovanni Bajo" <rasky at develer dot com>]

Arnaud Charlet <charlet@adacore.com> wrote:

>>> - portability of svn to non-Linux systems
>>
>> This has been answered already. It should not be an issue.
>
> Note that I found it a real pain to have to install so much
> dependency package on my linux system, so I suspect building the
> whole dependency packages under non linux systems might be slghtly of
> a pain. And I am not done yet with
> the OpenSSH update which seems kind of madatory to do any practical
> work.

Yes. I don't remember if there are issues with setting up a svn:// only
repository, which doesn't go through SSH.

Even if we assume that it's impossible to upgrade OpenSSH on a given platform
for some weird reason, the problem is probably going to be fixed by SVN 1.4 and
the new svn+ssl:// protocol. Meanwhile, unlucky people will have to live with a
slower "svn diff -rR1 -rR2" remote operation. Sorry about that, but let's not
remember of the other dozens which works on branches and can do a merge in
seconds instead of literally *hours*, and so on.

I don't think we can uniformly win everywhere, right now. I believe I have
already shown and spoken about many day-to-day advantages even for people
working only on mainline/release branches, and I'm sure that people that wanted
to listen have understood. Maybe somebody gave the wrong impression that
changing SCM was a thing with no issue in the transition, and no regression
whatsoever for every corner case possible. It's not like that (and we GCC
developers should know better about small regressions falling out of huge
improvements!)

CVS is a dead trail, and it's a huge bottleneck for many of us. SVN offers
many, many improvements for everybody, and a few regressions which are not even
by design and will be fixed someday (if we are lucky, in the next few months).
I believe we should all try to live with that.

As for your specific case, Arnaud, I assume that you do much SCM work, given
your "merge-centric" position. I'm more than happy to help you through this
transition and see if we can find out ways to improve your workflow with SVN.
As I told you in another mail, if you are interested, just provide me with more
information and let's see if we can work out something cool for you (even in
private mail, if you prefer for some reason).

Giovanni Bajo