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Re: Official GCC git repository
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 02:01:46PM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
> David> using before, as you point out. I've never really understood
> David> why anyone would bother to change from CVS to SVN -- it just
> David> seems to be part of the 'one VCS per project' insanity.
>
> I suspect you haven't looked at Subversion at all. It's vastly
> superior to CVS. As the book puts it, Subversion has "look and feel
> similar to CVS" while "attempting to fix most of CVS's noticeable
> flaws".
>
> To list just a few of the fixes: atomic checkouts and commits, instant
> branching/tagging, support for file rename, ability to reliably obtain
> any previous state of the source repository. Those are a few of the
> very good reasons why GCC switched. The unfortunate thing is that
> other FSF projects haven't yet switched -- it baffles me that this is
> so.
The real issue is centralization vs. decentralization. If you're going
centralized, then subversion seems to be the best solution available.
But there are substantial advantages to the decentralized model.
RMS has decided to back bzr for Emacs, and to encourage other GNU projects
to switch to it by declaring it to be the official GNU distributed VCS
(the bzr people have agreed to play this role). I haven't used bzr so I
won't offer any opinions on this.
However, if GCC proposes an official switch to a dVCS, RMS will push bzr.
That doesn't mean he gets his way; he wasn't happy with the svn switch
because svn clearly isn't GNU (it's Apache-licensed).