Seeking initial reactions: Moving setup from CVS to Subversion?

[Max Bowsher]

Larry Hall wrote:
> At 12:28 PM 8/19/2004, you wrote:
>> Why is this bad? setup development doesn't really have any ties to the 
>> rest
>> of cygwin development. How would this be a disadvantage?
>
>
> If the two groups of developers are not mutually exclusive, it's a
> disadvantage.  It sets up a barrier to all those in one group contributing
> to the other.  In the past at least, some reasonably sized sub-group of
> 'setup.exe' developers also contributed to cygwin.  Some in the cygwin
> development team also contributed to 'setup.exe'.  That's good. 
> Minimizing
> the pain involved in this cross-pollination is important.

You make a good point, though the CVS and Subversion mindsets are not so far 
apart that any barrier would be minimal. Also note that very little (none at 
all?) cross-pollination for as long as I can remember, even with both 
projects in the same VCS on the same server - so this does not seem to be in 
practice, of great importance.

> Have you considered the possibility of patching 'cvs' to do what you want?
> Just curious (i.e. I'm *not* asking because that's what I think you should
> do).

I can achieve what I absolutely *must* have (the ability to move and rename 
files without messing up the history, or losing the ability to refer to 
historical versions with great pain) by server-side scripted munging of the 
RCS files.

This doesn't bring me the many non-critical but nice extras that subversion 
would, though - e.g.
 more pleasant branching, ability to refer to a multi-file set of changes 
with a single identifier, easier merging as a consequence of this, 
disconnected add/rm/diff, more consistent user interface.

Those *aren't* critical. But they do make life easier. Especially where 
branching is concerned.

Max.