Re: CVS and Subversion

On Jun 12, 2004, at 2:51 AM, Glen Mazza wrote:

> I think it should be noted, for those unaware, that
> the ASF Chairman is a team member on the Subversion
> project.  (http://www.lyra.org/greg/)

Historically within the ASF people have separated their private life, 
role-at-work and other hobby-horses and their  hat's quite well. And I 
strongly believe that Greg is doing so carefully as well.

> Even if we're not being forced into SVN, this is
> something the Apache teams should be informed of.

I personally hope that things are kept separate. A lot of us have alter 
ego's working on other open source projects, on standards bodies and on 
proprietary code - and we really need to ensure that sound engineering 
judgement is not compromised by this - instead it should be something 
which strengthens.

But I can see that it may seem that there is a certain level of 
evangelizing akin to the 'take-it-all' that seen in the 
gnu/libtool/configure or in the qmail/djb-dns in that part of the 
world. Sofar however I completely trust the Infrastructure team to help 
the PMCs build the right infrastructure for the developers and for ASF 
(rather than force the ASF to use Subversion for market-share reasons) 
- and I've only seen the most professional of behaviours.

DO bear in mind that the ideas and concepts going into subversion 
derive directly from the ASF: it tries to address, fix or mitigate 
every fault and issue we have had over the past 5+ years in the ASF. So 
it is hard not to see this as 'nearly ideal' from a functional and code 
mntg perspective.

Ultimately however it is not the board, chariman or ASF who decides 
what each projects use - that is something for each PMC and
each committer/developer community themselves to determine. And the 
role of the ASF itself is limited to long term code custodianship which 
is far removed from the operational choice of a code mngt platform once 
the legal auditability and reconstruction needs are met.

Dw