source mgt. requirements solicitation

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> Not on the central repository, no.  But it might be that people
> (people without write access to the main repository) could usefully
> keep branches on their own repository (perhaps merging the patches in
> at some stage).  With CVS, that's not possible, but with a distributed
> CM system it would be.

Distributed CM could be a mixed blessing.  Sometimes when people merge
development from a branch to mainline the mainline ChangeLog such says
"See ChangeLog.foobar on foobar-branch for details." (though I don't think
this is a proper form of ChangeLog for such changes, the Changelog should
describe the changes made to mainline following the usual standards).  If
the branch sat on someone's machine elsewhere, there's then a lot of
potential for losing this information later if the machine goes away,
fails, etc. - whereas the main repository is at least rsyncable and
rsynced by various people.

(Such problems could be avoided if there were a mechanism by which such
branches of interest - probably including any discussed on the list, could
be "adopted" into the main repository, so that their history (maintained
on some other machine) is regularly made available from the main rsyncable 
repository and isn't lost if the originating machine goes away.  This 
applies even to branches that don't get merged to mainline (superseded by 
other branches, etc.) but which are of relevance to historical discussions 
on the lists.)

There is one notable problem with CVS's handling of users without write
access: they can't do "cvs add" to generate diffs with added files, though
they can fake its local effects.  I don't know whether svn fixes this.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk