Re: source repository

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-07-04 13:26, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> wrote:
>Eli Zaretskii writes:
>>> Oh.  A pity Emacs still uses so old system.
>>
>> Why should we care how old it is, if it suits our needs?
>
> Because it doesn't suit your needs.

I don't want to argue about this.  There are practices in the main Emacs
development team, which may not map so well in a dSCM, so let's leave
this for another 'flame' :-)

> *All* of that would be unnecessary with any modern dSCM, including the
> deep breaths.  Anybody with 100MB (well, that's what XEmacs requires
> w/o packages, so GNU Emacs might need 200MB?) of spare disk space can
> do a trial merge with no risk.

More like 120 MB.  I keep a local conversion of the CVS 'HEAD' branch on
my laptop, and the repository data of the branch in Mercurial needs
slightly more than 120 MB for the full history of the 'HEAD' branch.
A second clone uses less space (probably because of optimizations in the
clone operation):

  $ pwd
  /home/keramida/hg/emacs
  $ du -sk gnu/.hg gker/.hg
  127464  gnu/.hg
  74076   gker/.hg
  $

>> We are not exactly spoiled by abundance of free resources to invest
>> effort in jobs that are ``nice to have''.
>
> This is an investment with returns that Warren Buffett can only dream
> of.

Eli is right that some non-negligible amount of 'retraining' will be
needed though.  No investment comes without at least some cost :-/

> Familiarity is not a problem as long as only one of the SCMs is chosen
> as the official one.

This is theoretically true.  It's nice to avoid gratuitous breakage in
scripts and brain-investment in vc-mode learning though.  Right now, CVS
has excellent support in vc-mode.  The CVS support has been tested and
deployed in hundreds of places around the world for several years.

Mercurial support, on the other hand, is only in CVS 'HEAD' and it is
being tested (by yours truly, among others).  It has only been in the
repository for a few weeks, and there may be still be some rough edges.

Sometimes, it's all about familiarity and ease of use :-)

- Giorgos