[crossfire] Backup(?) CVS via darcs

[Lalo Martins]

Yes.  Please.  *Any* distributed version control system.

On Wed, 03 May 2006 22:59:28 -0600, Alex Schultz wrote:
> 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.

Cons: SVN server is a bit heavyweight.  It's not a distributed system;
there is a thing called svk which hacks distributedness on top of it.

> 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).

My only experience with darcs is collaborating to tailor (more on tailor
later).  I find it has a steep learning curve as you say; because it's
based on quite different principles.  If you're coming from no version
control at all (just sending patches around), it's a lot easier.

It's also written in some weird language, for which most people don't have
a working environment already.  (Which one is it again?  Let me check. 
Oh, Haskell.)  That's not a very big deal; it's compiled, and you don't
need any Haskell stuff to run it.  But if you decide to hack it, then you
have to learn a new language.  Whereas I hack bzr routinely, it even has a
very nifty plugin system.

> 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.

Well, bzr 0.8 is out at some point in May, according to Martin Pool; and
this is the point where the team is committing to stability and support.

I understand "maturity" though, it's a rather young system.

As for win32: there's no pretty GUI, but I use it at work, from the
windows command line, on a daily basis.  Works quite well for me.

It feels much slower than darcs, mercurial, or monotone, right now. 
Getting a branch with long history on 0.8 ('knit' format) takes much
longer than cvs, on 0.7 ('weave' format) it might take more than an hour.


An now on to Tailor:

Tailor is a tool originally written to sync SVN (or was it CVS?)
repositories to Darcs.  It's now a very interesting cross-VC syncer.  I
helped Rednaxela set up a Tailor config to mirror crossfire's cvs repo to
bzr (with the intention of using the bzr version myself, too, once it was
working).  I just thought I should mention.  Whatever distributed VC we
switch to, tailor could be used to do the migration.  I'd be willing to do
the actual work (well, what little there is, as Rednaxela already did the
ugly parts).  And it can also be used afterwards, to keep a read-only CVS
copy of the main branch, as you say.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
--
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--
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