[crossfire] Backup(?) CVS via darcs

[Alex Schultz]

I've been thinking about this a bit, and IMHO, switching to anything but 
CVS would be an improvement, and that switching would be good for the 
long term, not just for backup. For one, just about any other version 
control system allows local branches of the code easier which would be 
helpful for working on larger features, and also if we don't use 
sourceforge we will be free from various limitations Here is my opinion 
of Darcs as well as some other alternatives to CVS:

SVN:
Rather nice and mature, and a very easy learning curve from CVS. It has 
the "advantage" that we could stick with sourceforge for version 
control, however that could easily have the same uptime issues as SF CVS 
some time down the road.

Darcs:
Like SVN, also seems to good mature one. I don't know much about it but 
it looks like it might be nicer than either SVN or CVS in many ways. It 
would however have a little bit of a steeper learning curve from cvs 
users, but personally I'm *very* willing to learn it (in fact, I've been 
planing to eventually some time anyways).

Bazaar-ng:
I've tried this python based one a bit, and it seems very nice with good 
features, except two major issues that make it IMHO *not* suitable for 
crossfire: Not very mature of an API and featureset, and also from what 
I understand doesn't work on win32. It is however the best one I've seen 
in terms of ease of making local branches.

Also, as a general note, I believe that in any of these cases, we should 
sync back to SF cvs, because for when that is up, it would be an easier 
place to get development versions from than darcs, as common users 
generally wouldn't install darcs just for downloading the latest 
development version of crossfire, or it would also be possible set the 
darcs server to build tarballs on a nightly basis, however this wouldn't 
give non-developers a way to see the revision logs and such via the 
command line, however I'm not sure how important this is.

Alex Schultz


Rick Tanner wrote:

>For possible discussion...
>
>Now that we are looking at week #6 of anonymous CVS access at
>SourceForge being offline (and development CVS access off & on during
>that time..) what about using something like darcs which is a
>distributed revision control system?
>
>http://darcs.net/
>http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki
>