Seeking initial reactions: Moving setup from CVS to Subversion?

[Max Bowsher]

Alexander Gottwald wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Max Bowsher wrote:
>
>> It seems incredibly unlikely that people in general will ever decide on 
>> "the
>> best source control system". Which people in particular do you want to 
>> wait
>> for?
>
> IMO arch and svn have large pros but also large cons.
>
> + arch can do great merging
> - arch does not support windows properly

Arch also has a long and steep learning curve.

> + svn has great windows support (TortoiseSVN)
> - svn has poor merging

Svn has good merging. It lacks merge *tracking* but thanks to the global 
revision numbering of subversion, it's a _lot_ easier to keep track of this 
yourself.

> if any of these systems removes the disadvantage it will attract a lot 
> more
> users. But until this happens every step towards one of them may lead to
> a deadend where you can't get your revision history from the system and
> are stuck with the wrong system.

CVS is actually quite difficult to extract revision history from. As one of 
the committers to cvs2svn, I'm extremely aware of this.

Subversion, on the other hand, has a well defined dumpfile format, which can 
be read through in one pass, and provides all the information, in 
time-order, rendering it a trivial scripting job to replay the entire 
history of commits into the alternate version control system of your choice.

Max.