[slime-devel] Re: cvs committed darcs changes

[Attila Lendvai]

> > imho, slime is naturally a project of many branches because everyone
> > has their own desires that may or may not be meant for public
> > consumption.
>
> The project survived without branches for a really long time. Wouldn't

just like many programmers survived with c (i'm honestly sorry for
this strike, but i just couln't help it... :)

> it become more complicated to all the slime users (especially ones
> that are not subscribed to the list) if we had multiple repositories
> with different sets of features/goals?

they don't have to know about any of this: one big command line ready
to be copy-pasted that gets the official stable repo.

and i only proposed 2 repos with and extra temporary third one when
there's some huge change that renders slime temporarily unstable. but
slime will probably never have such a refactor.

> Why not use bzr[1] or git[2] or even subversion[3] (yep a slightly
> better support for branches would be enough as slime doesn't really
> need a distributed development model) then? Both of them are a lot
> more stable when it comes to huge diffs, conflicts, extra files in the
> repository and for someone coming from CVS the loss off the
> interactive hunk picking (bzr/git don't have this one) won't be such
> big a loss.

ymmv. i tried the distributed model and i never looked back (see my
previous mail for reasons).

> [1] http://bazaar-vcs.org/Bzr
> [2] http://git.or.cz/
> [3] http://subversion.tigris.org/

in my point of view, subversion is out of the scope because it's not a
distributed source control system (it's basically cvs rewritten).

bazaar and git both use the same basic idea that darcs. they are like
different implementations of it, so much so that newer darcs binaries
will support git repositories (details:
http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/DarcsGit ).

i must admit that i don't know bazaar and git too well, but on the
other hand darcs never made my life hard (well, maybe sometimes, but
never without a valid reason that could have been avoided). and i have
a local darcs repo of dojo with a size that is not even comparable to
slime. on the other hand darcs can apply patches that change files
that were meanwhile renamed by another patch. and features like
that...

also bazaar seems to have a bad reputation (without me having
first-hand experience with bazaar, this guy sounds reasonable):
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2024

oh, and the first thing you can read on git's site is this: "Git -
Fast Version Control System" :)

> The downside is that darcs would make it more difficult for people
> using slime on mac, windows, some flavours of unix (a lot of
> programmers) to use and would make it easier for you and your
> co-workers to develop (not so many programmers) or would add
> additional work for main developers of slime (they would have to make
> additional tar.gz releases, learn a new version control system)

again, i'm fine and i don't really want to convert anyone or anything
anymore. but i must tell here that i used darcs both on windows and on
linux and it was working out of the box. if you want to commit stuff
then you must set up an ssh login with keys (unless you are ready to
enter your ssh password a thousand times), but that's documented all
around on the net ranging from putty to cygwin's ssh.

i don't know about mac in particual, but this page has binaries not
only for mac but even for solaris and aix:
http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/CategoryBinaries

> Though I think darcs is superior to CVS IMHO it would solve problems
> to a very narrow group of people while creating at least some problems
> to a lot of slime users.

any kind of change in any aspect of life means that you need to leave
a local minimum of "energy consumption" in the hope of reaching a
better one. it's just like when you learn a new language, but i guess
i don't need to go into the details of this particular tought on this
particular list... :)

my envisioned model with darcs is not so much about solving problems
then opening new possibilities (which seems like the majority of the
slime devs are not missing or they just don't care enough to speak up,
and therefore i started to consider the effort of trying to move away
from the current local minimum more pain then what it's worth for me).

iow, i started to consider less pain to pack up my patches in my
backpack and climb that mountain occasionally when the need comes,
then trying to move the village... sorry for the silly methaphore...
:)

-- 
- attila

"- The truth is that I've been too considerate, and so became
unintentionally cruel...
 - I understand.
 - No, you don't understand! We don't speak the same language!"
(Ingmar Bergman - Smultronstället)