Re: Subversion

Arthur Bergman wrote:
> First of all, checking out parrot using subversion takes at least 4 
> time slonger than CVS

AFAIK the svn developers are aware of this, and they say that people
don't checkout that often anyway (moreover I think one can enable
mod_deflate over mod_dav_svn).

> Doing a vendor checkin brining up parrot to latest version is a major 
> pain the arse. The process alone of running svn_load_dirs takes around 
> an hour, and then I have to tag it (because if you tell svn_load_dirs 
> to tag things automatically it breaks). It also seems not to have 
> changed some stuff when other stuff has changed! 
> (http://svn.perl.org/ponie/vendor/parrot/current/config/auto/gcc.pl is 
> one file that should have been updated).

Last time I looked at svn_load_dirs.pl I decided not to use it. That was
some time ago, though. Now, I merge by hand (I have not to do this very
often) by untarring the source package in a working copy.

> Committing two files took 1 minute 22 second yesterday, a checkout is 
> extremely painfully slow. I am very close to saying it is a failed 
> experiment and either go to p4 or cvs for the time being.

That's weird.
The commit in svn is done in two phases :
a - if you haven't specified any target, svn scans recursively all
    subdirectories to find modified files -- this can take a lot of
    time, esp. on a slow disk. In other words, C<svn ci foo.h bar.c>
    is *a lot* faster than C<svn ci .> at the root dir of your large
    project.
b - svn transfers a diff to the svn http server. This is usually fast
    (unless, of course, you're checking in large binary files etc.)

> A very angry Arthur who has spent far too much time battling an 
> substandard versioning system. (which might be theoretically very nice, 
> but does not scale)

Remember, I had scaling worries.

cvs may be a pain when we will want to reintegrate the changes into
activestate's main p4 repos. But Barrie Slaymaker's VCS (on CPAN)
may help. You may want to look at it.

p4 rul3z, but we're going to rely on ActiveState for that. Although a
free-of-charge licence may be negotiated for open source projects (see
at their website for the details.) And BTW IIRC Ask is very happy to
have no longer to deal with p4...

HTH.