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Date:      Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:48:28 +0000 (UTC)
From:      Janne Snabb <snabb@epipe.com>
To:        perryh@pluto.rain.com
Cc:        freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Distributed Version Control for ports(7) ( was: Re: autoconf update )
Message-ID:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.1009201312040.96753@tiktik.epipe.com>
In-Reply-To: <4c975197.1fY0dTyqrEwwwGi5%perryh@pluto.rain.com>
References:  <4C91446F.3090202@bsdforen.de> <20100916171744.GA48415@hades.panopticon> <4C927ED0.5050307@bsdforen.de> <86zkvhfhaa.fsf@gmail.com> <4C92C14D.3010005@FreeBSD.org> <4C92F195.5000605@FreeBSD.org> <4C93A107.4070809@DataIX.net> <4c93f602.pzTXVEQ%2B3q2cRA23%perryh@pluto.rain.com> <4C94617B.3080702@bsdforen.de> <20100918141727.22a81b66@it.buh.tecnik93.com> <4C95AFE4.30608@DataIX.net> <174981284967033@web24.yandex.ru> <4c975197.1fY0dTyqrEwwwGi5%perryh@pluto.rain.com>

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On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, perryh@pluto.rain.com wrote:

> One issue with either Git or Mercurial is that they are GPL.
> AFAIK FreeBSD prefers to avoid GPL in the base or in critical
> widely-used infrastructure if a viable non-GPL alternative
> exists.

The project currently uses Perforce for many sub-projects, so using
GPL licenced solution could hardly be a problem. I was shocked to
notice that I need a proprietary binary-only software which does
whatever unbeknownst to me to be able to access the TrustedBSD
repositories.

Using some free modern VCS for new sub-projects which would
traditionally go to perforce would be a good way and first-use
candidate to start experimenting with and getting developers used
to the slightly different new way of doing things.


>From my point of view as a *user* it would be very nice to have
some modern VCS interface to ports and src. The current system (SVN
& CVS) makes it troublesome for users to keep in sync with the
central repository while maintaining their local modifications.
Also, if I want to be able to access port version history easily,
I need to use anoncvs to update my ports tree, but that is terribly
slow (or I could mirror the whole CVS repository to my disk, but
that is quite a bloat). Luckily src has been migrated to SVN, which
makes my life slightly easier.

The above is just a point of view as a pure consumer of the source
tree. My contributions to the project come as patches in PRs (it
would be easier to work on those patches with a modern VCS). My
personal favourite is Bazaar as it tracks not only files but also
directories properly, which I need for some projects, Mercurial
comes 2nd and Git 3rd as it is quite a mess. All of them are tolerable :).

I do know that the migration is a big burden which makes the whole
thing very difficult to accomplish.

--
Janne Snabb / EPIPE Communications
snabb@epipe.com - http://epipe.com/



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