A couple more subversion notes

[Paolo Bonzini]

> uses "CVS" for mainline most people people can check out; it uses
> "arch" for manging branches where developers do experiments.

I found arch very interesting, and I am using it for GNU sed and GNU 
Smalltalk.  I liked very much the idea of working offline, and the very 
small requirements that are placed on the server (you only need a HTTP 
server with support for FTP or SFTP uploads).  The latter is probably 
the only reason why I won't switch away from arch for a while.

It is also extremely nice to make queries such as "tell me which patches 
I applied into the stable branch, coming from the development branch".

On the other hand, it simply does not scale.  For GNU Smalltalk, which 
has a 4 megabyte tarball and 1084 versioned files, it takes some 20 
seconds to do a commit (I'm going by memory, maybe it's more). 
Performance improvements have been made in the last few months, as well 
as user interface improvements, and I have not yet upgraded; but the 
overall picture is the same.

Personally, I have been grateful that my regression-fix patches touch 
only one or two files plus the ChangeLog.  It's been an annoyance to 
backport them even if they were this simple.  With arch I simply did

    tla replay smalltalk--devo--2.2--patch-45
    tla commit

and with subversion it is more or less the same.

Yes, it requires more setup.  On the other hand, I never knew about 
connection multiplexing for example, and I think I'll use it for other 
machines I often ssh to (not only gcc.gnu.org), now that I know about it.

Paolo