[tex-live] svn vs. p4

Staszek Wawrykiewicz staw at gust.org.pl
Thu Apr 27 06:46:15 CEST 2006


On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Karl Berry wrote:

> Meanwhile, the dirs-changed stuff is a detail.  I know from your
> separate mail to me that svn is proving extremely painful to you, and if
> TL is ever going to make another release, there is no question that you
> need to be able to work efficiently.
> 
> So what is acceptable to you?  Should we forget about svn and go back to
> p4 permanently?  We can do that, but it would be best to decide to do it
> now, before any "real" changes have been made to the svn repository.
> 
> I myself could be persuaded either way.  Many operations were
> significantly more efficient with p4.  P4 keeps track of changes from
> the repository itself, so it rarely needs to traverse the repository.
> 
> Svn, by contrast, has to do that all the time, since it essentially
> keeps information on a directory-by-directory basis.  On our 2gb
> repository, this is inherently slow.  I don't know of any other svn
> projects nearly this big; gcc is small by comparison.
> 
> On the other hand, svn has no licensing issues, and its paradigm is much
> more widely familiar to developers.  Perhaps there is a greater chance
> that TL could eventually have more contributors with svn.
> 
> What do you think?  What do others think?  Perhaps something to ponder
> on the way to / at BachoTeX ...

Karl, many thanks for your notes, patience and deep insight. I'd like to
say that I'm not against svn. I like it and I'm happy to use svn for 3
other projects (anyway much more small). Last year we experimented with
berlioz and sarovar, but failed to use, as you wrote, efficiently.
Well, we will try to discuss that problem at BachoTeX. Sight.
And again, what do others think?

All the best,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW at gust.org.pl




More information about the tex-live mailing list