[Adium-devl] VCS + SVN 1.5

[Augie Fackler]

On Dec 25, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Colin Barrett wrote:

>> * Augie, you've been a proponent of subversion 1.5 in the past.   
>> Could you brief us, in a new thread, on how branching & merging is  
>> best accomplished using that?  I'm wholly enamored of monotone at  
>> this point, 99% for its branch & propagate model which requires no  
>> tracking by its users.
>>

Frankly, SVN 1.5 is stalled. Like, really stalled. They've hit some  
major snags in the merge tracking for now (some design issues came up  
in (if I understand correctly) the treatment of branches as cheap in- 
filesystem copies). If you want branching + merging _now_, you'll need  
to migrate to something else. I have to admit I'm a bit more taken  
with Mercurial than Monotone (it's been *tons* faster for me), but it  
really doesn't matter much what we end up using. Monotone might make  
more sense because then we've got one VCS across us and Pidgin. Since  
mtn supports pushing (it *does*, right?) it'll be fine for us.

When SVN 1.5 works, which is an indeterminate point in the future  
(I've been a bit out of the loop on how long it's projected to take.  
There are some reflective merge problems that I don't quite understand.

That all said, we can *probably* use svnmerge.py to get most/all of  
the merging features we need. SVN 1.5, when it exists, will have a  
clean migration path for svnmerge.py's mergeinfo.

My concern with mtn is that if we switch to it, we need a better intro  
to using mtn than I've seen around - most of the existing explanations  
are too much too quick for most users IMO.

I don't know what really gives us a better end result. If we do move  
to mtn, I think it might make the most sense to just do a clean import  
and keep the svn history intact as-is so we don't have to screw around  
with the old branches and stuff on disk in mtn.

We should come up with a list of options and evaluate them. The three  
I see as most viable right now are svn+svnmerge.py, hg, and mtn. We  
could try svnmerge.py now, and I'm willing to try and work with people  
on that.

Peace,
Augie

(My name is Augie, and I'm a version control and build systems junkie.  
Admitting I have a problem is the first step to a solution.)