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[Arx-users] Why not ArX?
From: |
Kevin Smith |
Subject: |
[Arx-users] Why not ArX? |
Date: |
Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:52:27 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20040916) |
Greetings,
Recently, I asked myself: Why isn't ArX getting much attention?
Here's the background behind that question: I am completely sold on the
concept of distributed version control, so I have been researching and
experimenting for about a year now. I have evaluated (to varying
depths): arch, ArX, monotone, darcs, codeville, and archipel.
Of those, ArX and monotone seem the most promising for my own projects.
Both are in C++. ArX is substantially more stable. Yet monotone seems to
have a much more active discussion list, and seems to have several
active code contributors. That seems odd.
My first thought was that people might be ignoring ArX because they
believe it is merely a pale fork of arch (which it clearly is not). But
when I did a little research, I see that ArX is simply flying under the
radar. The following pages include lists of distributed version control
systems:
http://better-scm.berlios.de/
http://www.venge.net/monotone/others.html
http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/versioncontrol.shtml
http://zooko.com/revision_control_quick_ref.html
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Configuration_Management/Tools/
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/links/scm-links.html#Free_CM_Tools
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/scm.html
None of them mention ArX (except the last one, where it is mentioned in
the arch paragraph). There are probably other similar lists out there.
There are also prominent articles like these that omit ArX:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/scm.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/01/29/scm_overview.html
And there are some relevant blogs:
http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/
http://del.icio.us/tv/version-control
So now I'm thinking that the biggest reason people aren't joining the
ArX community in larger numbers is that ArX is a hard project to find
out about. Monotone has had strong buzz for a while, as has arch. Even
darcs hit the spotlight recently with its 1.0 release.
Is it time to crank up an ArX marketing machine? Would it be better to
wait a bit for the 2.x series to mature a little more?
Unfortunately, since deciding to evalutate ArX a few weeks ago, I
haven't actually been able to use it on real tasks. So although I still
hope ArX turns out to be as good as it looks, I'm not yet in a position
where I can publicly state that it's a great tool.
However, I would be very willing to help raise awareness of ArX. Here
are some concrete marketing tasks that might increase ArX adoption, and
some of which I would be willing to help with:
- Submit ArX to the maintainers of pages like those mentioned above
- Submit release news items to lwn.net
- Create .rpm .deb and gentoo ebuilds
- Write articles for lwn, newsforge, etc
- Make the ArX home page prettier
- Port ArX to MS Windows (and Mac OS X)
Kevin
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