Re: A couple more subversion notes

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet at adacore dot com>]

> DanJ put up a wiki page on the OpenSSH configuration (which really could be
> found with 3 minutes of googling, which is shorter than writing a mail asking
> information about it [not speaking of you, gaby]).

Well, with all your respect, you seem to be living in a different world than
mine.

In your world, everyone has an up-to-date version of every tool,
and have e.g. the latest OpenSSH and subversion clients installed
on his machine. In mine, this is clearly far from being the case:
no svn installed, and a 3.x openssh.

So with this world in mind, this is clearly not 3 minutes that are needed
to get the right set up.

Same for saying "this will be improved in the next version of svn".
It is assuming that upgrading versions of svn clients for people is a no
cost operation, which is again not the case in practice.

And maybe if svn 1.4 will improve such important improvements, it would
be a good idea to wait till svn 1.4 is outt so that people do not have to
upgrade multiple times to get "the expected" behavior.

Also remember that the vast majority of people accessing the cvs tree have
not even started looking at svn, so I am sure many more issues will come.

> It might end up being not
> strictly necessary if DannyB sets up a read-only svn:// repository (no SSH
> required), but I'm sure that a release manager as you wants to have very fast
> ssh connections to gcc.gnu.org also for other reasons.

Same for me, I do not think it will be practical for me to switch between
svn and svn+ssh protocols.

Note that I am not at all opposed to this change.

I would simply like things to be stated in a fair way and as accurately as
possible so that people can decide on the best way to go, while a few svn
enthusiasts around here (not all of them fortunately) seem to be drawing a
"almost-perfect" picture which is not what people will be facing in reality
before quite some time (e.g. I see references to svn 1.4 while the latest
official release is 1.2.3).

So my gut feeling is that this switch is too early and that based on the
feedback received so far, we should aim at:

- getting more feedback from as much people as possible (and saying "reminder:
  the switch will occur in a week" was relatively effective at that ;-)
- getting as much improvements in svn 1.4 as possible
- switch when 1.4.x is out and considered stable enough so that people
  can use it heavily

Now, I understand that there are many other considerations around here
that will likely make this switch earlier, but anyway, my 2 euro cents.

Arno