[ILUG] Distributed versus Centralised SCM.

[Paul Jakma]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, kevin lyda wrote:

> while it might be centralised...
>
> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/apas03.html

Ah nice.

> is that the "always being rewritten" one?

It has multiple implementations, yes. That's more a testament to 
Arch's reuse of existing Unix tools though (tar, patch, etc..) and 
general non-reinventing of wheels, allowing it to stay small and 
easily implementable. IIRC you don't even need an arch tool to 
checkout an arch repository, just standard tools like tar and patch. 
(on the downside, this means, iirc, using Arch on non-unix platforms 
could be problematic).

My main problems with SVN were (when I last tried it):

S1. Berkely DB as backing store for everything, and not terribly
   reliable.

(this might have been fixed. Plus it has a 'file' backing store now 
too)

S2. The standalone svnserve server lacked secure authentication, and
     didn't support any kind of access control.

(no idea whether this has improved.)

S3. The apache module version scares me. The configuration seems easy
     to get wrong, and I'm just generally scared of a big huge SCM
     being implemented inside my webserver.

My main problems with GNU Arch are:

A1. The interface is very different to CVS. (SVN's is not).

A2. Additionally, the interface is horrendously cluttered and hard to
     get to grips with. This is I guess an artifact of it having
     accumulated lots of cruft while Arch was being designed and
     developed. There is a project underway to improve the UI of arch.
     (bazaar - implemention with original UI seems complete, they're
      still working on a better UI though).

On the plus side, the server-side requirements of GNU Arch is far 
more appealing. Because of the distributed thing, you simply don't 
need *any* server - least not one which is 'writeable'. The only 
thing you might want is something that can serve filesystem content 
in some way (ftp, http, sftp, nfs - exactly what doesnt matter.). 
It'll even work over more email :)

SVN, with above caveats, is *way* better than CVS. You'll be really 
happy with using SVN over CVS (if the server side stuff doesnt bother 
you).

However, distributed SCM is even better. So I'm holding out hoping 
for GNU Arch to become user-friendly. If 'svnserve' gains auth and 
acl features i want before Arch becomes user-friendly, then I might 
reconsider.

> kevin

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:

Dasher, Dancer ... Prancer ... Nixon, Comet, Cupid ... Donna Dixon.

 		-- Homer Simpson
 		   Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire