[crossfire] crossfire source code control systems

[Lalo Martins]

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:13:14 -0600, Alex Schultz wrote:
> Mark Wedel wrote:
>> Key requirements (if it doesn't meet these, not usuable - probably everything 
>> out there does)

It looks complete to me, at least it has everything *I* want :-)

Maybe I should make a point here I made on IRC, for the record.  It's
about local branches.

One thing we should keep in mind is maintenance of local map trees.  About
two years ago, a friend of mine who works on bugzilla commented on how
useful distributed SCMs would be for them, because "in practise, every
bugzilla installation is a fork".  That rings true to me; I'd expect a
large percentage of server admins to have some hacked maps, local maps,
and hacked/local scripts; or else they wish they had but they're afraid
cvs will clobber their stuff.

With a distributed SCM, you'll install your maps dir as a local branch,
branched from the maps mainline.  Then you can make your own changes and
commit them -- you even get local revision control for your stuff.  And
when you need to update your maps, you just merge from the mainline; that
*may* cause conflicts, but it's guaranteed to never lose your changes (as
they will, at the very least, be in the history).

>> - Supported by sourceforge, or secondarily, some other free hosting
>> service (I'd much rather someone else has to deal with any
>> adminstrative issues of the software, like update to latest version,
>> etc)
>>   
> That is a trickier requirement and limits things a bit. Most mainstream
> ones are just CVS and/or SVN. Launchpad.net (funded/ran by Canonical
> Ltd.) provides bzr SCM. Also, Mercurial can run out of sf.net project
> web space. However I've missed some hosting or something else can run in
> project web space, I don't think we can look go beyond CVS, SVN, bzr,
> and Mercurial with this requirement (not that it's a problem, just that
> unless someone knows of something I've missed, that's something that
> limits our choices).

Actually most distributed SCMs can work from sourceforge's web hosting
space, including bzr.  That's not a very nice setup though; repositories
tend to get quite large, so they'll probably fill your quota before long,
and if you cry for sf support, they'll say "damn man, you're not supposed
to be using it this way".

I should note that other sf-like sites explicitly allow you to do that;
for one, before launchpad was up, I published my powerchick branch at
gna.org (not in my web area, but in my file download space).

And finally, as an extra note on launchpad -- all the crossfire trees are
already there in bzr format, except maps that for some reason failed to
convert.  They provide their own cvs->bzr conversion, all you have to do
is put the cvs info in a form and launchpad will convert it and keep it up
to date.  So anyone who wants to try pulling some crossfire source tree
via bzr can use the branches at launchpad.

>> - Efficient use of resources (network bandwidth, cpu, etc) - it
>> shouldn't take 15 minutes to check out the server, for example.
>>   
> I know bzr used to be really slow but apparently has been improved alot,
> however I have heard it is not bandwidth efficent still.

They released 0.9 which is supposedly much faster yesterday.  I've yet to
try it out... I'll let you know what I find when I do :-)

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
--
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       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
--
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