On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 04:32:48PM -0700, Nate Williams wrote: > > What is the status of Perforce in the FreeBSD project? Is the issue the > > absence of a "p4up"? Licensing? Inertia? > > See the archives for a more thorough discussion, but I believe the > licensing is the biggest issue. If we moved to use commercial software, > it would make our development much more difficult for the average > developer to track our progress.
I think one only needs to take a look at the Linux community and the situation they have found themselves in wrt to BitKeeper to understand the risks associated with making a project dependent on commercial source control. Even if our license with Perforce were rather liberal, without access to the Perforce source code we are leaving a lot of things to chance. What happens if Perforce folds or discontinues their source control product? Are our bits forever trapped inside a p4 repo which is dependent on binaries which may eventually cease working with our ABI and/or APIs and require a compatibility layer? What if we port to new platforms which Perforce doesn't offer binaries for (or even worse, they've folded and we can no longer get new binaries)? I think we have an opportunity to learn from the mistakes Linux has made here and we'd be foolish not to. It is important to note that CVS and Perforce are nowhere near the only options available in this space. In fact, CVS is not the only open source product out there. I think FreeBSD would be wise to consider a move to Subversion[0] when it reaches release, as it fixes most of the bugs and complaints about CVS while following POLA. svn(1) works pretty much like cvs(1) and that's a Good Thing<tm>. For a full discussion of the various SCMs available, both open source and proprietary, see Rick Moen's listing of them[1]. [0] - http://subversion.tigris.org/ [1] - http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/scm.html Brandon D. Valentine -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.geekpunk.net Pseudo-Random Googlism: valentine is currently undertaking an esrc funded research project into living on the edge To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
