Subversion worries

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Arthur Bergman wrote:

> On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 06:56  pm, Andy Dougherty wrote:

> > I'm currently trying a subversion checkout, and will see if there are
> > any remaining obvious problem spots.  However, the subversion process
> > is so slow and painful, it might be awhile!

> Sadly, because the process is so slow and painful I haven't updated to
> latest parrot yet :(

I wonder if subversion is indeed the right tool for this job.  My
initial reaction, based on my one-day encounter, is probably not.  Here
are three problems I encountered with it:

1.  There is potentially a significant installation hurdle.  Unless
    you're on one of the few platforms for which there's a prebuilt
    binary, you have to build it yourself.  That's ordinarily not too
    big a deal, but when I tried this yesterday on Solaris 8, here's
    what I encountered:

    a.  The tar file wouldn't unpack cleanly.  I get 'directory
    checksum error'.  This has to do with filenames with length > 100
    characters.

    b.  The initial build went ok, but then the INSTALL file clearly
    recommends bootstrapping from a fresh svn checkout.  Alas, that's
    not a trivial job, as I was missing the following dependencies:

	Apache Portable Runtime 0.9.4 (http://apr.apache.org/)
	autoconf 2.50 or newer (Unix only)
	libtool 1.4 or newer (Unix only)
	bison or yacc (Unix only)
	Neon library 0.23.9 (http://www.webdav.org/neon/)
	Berkeley DB 4.0.14
	Python 2.0 (http://www.python.org/)
	Libraries for our libraries

    If one of the goals is to involve people with a diverse range of
    platforms, then this hurdle may prove to be a significant barrier.
    On the other hand, that might not be significant for this project,
    since it will likely leverage the portability and testing of the
    perl5 and parrot communities.

    Clearly, as subversion matures, this will likely be less of an issue.
    However, as it stands today, it's worth worrying about.

2.  It's SLOW!!!!  It took me 2 hours and 24 minutes to checkout ponie.
    One side effect of this is immediately obvious above -- it's an impediment
    to keeping up-to-date with the rapidly changing state of parrot.

3.  It's a disk hog.  The subversion-checked-out ponie/perl directory
    is over twice as big as the perl-5.8.x directory.  That's because
    all the information is duplicated in the hidden .svn
    subdirectories.  For small projects, this isn't a big deal, but for
    me, for two projects as big as parrot and perl, the extra disk space is
    significant.  I'm sure there are sensible technical reasons for it, but
    it's still a lot of disk space for me.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		[email protected]