Re: Subversion worries

On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 02:51  pm, Andy Dougherty wrote:

> From: Andy Dougherty <[email protected]>
> Date: Fri Aug 22, 2003  2:51:01  pm Europe/London
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: 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:
>
>     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.
>

I do see this as a major problem, going back to rsync is just a huge 
step backwards.

> 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.
>

Thankfully updates are bit faster, but a 3 line commit took me 3 
minutes yesterday. It is horrendously slow :(.

> 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.
>

That is because it keeps everything duplicated, so diff and revert are 
faster! Sigh

I guess the alternative would move to either p4 or cvs, and then most 
likely cvs?

Arthur