At the risk of being criticised again, I will lay out a couple of problems that
need to be addressed as part of making any progress on DVCS support.
The first question is 'Do we need DVCS?'
The answer is simple - yes - but what and how is not so clear cut.
(Bare with me ...)
This leads on to 'What is stopping using DVCS currently?'
And the answer is in the rfc - "We will not convert the whole SVN repository at
once."
A mirror of the existing SVN repository falls over because of the size. So would
it be possible to break down the base into more manageable chunks without moving
it to DVCS? Modularize the existing code so that DVCS mirrors are more practical?
It is this area that is probably more important to get agreement on than
selecting a particular DVCS system. The submodule/subrepo handling process has
been relegated to subsequent RFC's, when in reality it is handling this area
which is key to getting a fully DVCS based system working at all and how the
underlying system handles it needs to be part of the decision process?
The other question I think is a no-brainer. 'Where is a DVCS solution hosted?'
Choosing a solution simply because github is more popular than bitbucket did
annoy me when other projects made it, but in the case of PHP I don't think
anybody would suggest that the whole repo system would be moved to one of these?
So the master repos would be at dvcs.php.net?
That being the case, with the correct modular structure, then people should be
able to simply clone to their preferred DVCS system, and commit changes back via
karma authentication? I have no doubt that work in progress would then be
appearing on bitbucket, github and private hosts, but everybody knows where the
master codebase can be found.
In hindsight, the SVN move probably took too long to agree on, and developments
in other areas were already at that time pressing on that process. But at that
time DVCS systems were definitely not ready for handling modular code bases like
PHP, and I would argue at the moment that this is still an area that is not
totally developed? Simply mirroring CVS to DVCS would probably have been a lot
easier process to manage, but we are now 'lumbered' with SVN, so can the SVN
experts offer any ideas to creating a path forward?
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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