Re: SVN for src, status?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at sourceware dot org>]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:31:15AM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 04:48:06PM -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
>>> "Joseph S. Myers" writes:
>>>>How does git handle the key feature for src, sparse checkouts (a single
>>>>repository from which you can check out just the parts relevant for
>>>>binutils, or GDB, or ..., or everything,
>>>FWIW, I used to think this sort of thing was a "key feature" too, but
>>>when checkouts, commits, merges, and basically everything is so damn
>>>fast, there is really no need for it.  (The mechanism by which current
>>>src/configure limits the builds to whichever source trees actually
>>>exist in the checkout would have to be changed.)
>>
>>FWIW, this is my feeling too.  I would *prefer* not to have to check
>>out sid every time; but it's not going to break my heart if I have to,
>>especially since git checkouts are much faster than CVS/SVN.
>
>Living in the industrialised west, I have reasonable amounts of drive
>space, cpu cycles, and always-on connection bandwidth myself.
>
>But I am *sure* that others are not as lucky as I am, and I would want
>to take great care to avoid any decision that might exclude *anyone*
>from participation in our movement - particularly on grounds of access
>to wealth or resources.
>
>This does not necessarily speak for or against one RCS system or
>another; to me, it's a vitally important overarching policy concern,
>which technical measures are there to implement.  Ease of participation
>is the lifeblood of open source.

I don't think it's profitable to speculate that the project will suffer
because a mythical contributor won't have enough resources to check out
the sources.  That's a slippery slope the bottom of which would be that
we can't switch at all since SVN uses a fair bit more disk space than
CVS.

That plus the fact that gcc is already using both SVN and git and glibc
has moved to git would seem to indicate that worrying about potential
contributors who can't muster enough resources to check out the source
code isn't worth the effort.

I also don't particularly like the idea of checking out sid every time I
want to grab a copy of Cygwin either.  Maybe it's time to split the
repository by the top-level directories and provide some mechanism for
merging them?

cgf