At 12:14 AM 9/6/00 -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
>Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > The decisions should be based on technical merit and general availability.
>
>I would include "available under a free software license" as part of the
>definition of "general availability".
You would, but in this case I don't. We can give anyone we want a client
and get them access to the repository.
>For example, perforce doesn't ship standard with operating system
>distributions such as Red Hat, Debian, and FreeBSD, because it isn't under a
>free software license. However, CVS does ship with those systems.
So? CVS is still inferior, and there are a *lot* of other operating systems
in the world. Having to go fetch one program to check things in really
isn't a hardship.
>Also, what if people want to learn how the source system works on their own,
>and experiment with it?
They can go do it on a test repository they set up on a scratch machine.
I'd rather people not play with the p6 repository honestly--we're going to
have enough problems of our own.
>With only 100-user license, we are pretty tight as
>to who can do that. There are probably more than 100 people on the various
>perl6 mailing lists who'd want to at least experiment with the system on
>their own.
Anyone who wants it can get a 2-user license to perforce to set up and run
wherever, which is just dandy. (And I don't want the perl repository being
a test anyway) Ask can always get more licenses if he needs, so the 99-user
current limit (I's like one of the licenses dedicated to anonymous
read-only access) isn't a big deal.
>On another point, developers typically want to run checked-out versions of
>the software if they are actively participating. I have always been sad I
>was unable to do this with perl5, even though I wasn't an active developer.
Huh? You've always been able to. The development tree (or one version of
it) has always been available from activestate, and a perforce ID or
anonymous access has been available for the asking.
>I would hate to see perl6 development go the same route. The code would
>remain much more public and accessible if it were available via anonymous
>CVS. Isn't that something we want?
There were plans to set up a read-only CVS mirror last I knew, and I don't
think that's changed. The perl 5 tree's available via FTP and rsync, and I
don't see any reason to change that for perl 6. And, honestly, if the effort
>One might argue that we can use a "snapshot" system can solve this problem.
>In my experience, The "snapshot" system can be quite inconvenient, for both
>those submitting patches and those accepting them. It just doesn't beat
>anonymous CVS access.
That's fine. We set up anonymous perforce access, or people can use the CVS
mirror.
Either way it doesn't matter, since I feel strongly that we should be
accommodating people working from a point-release version *anyway*.
Compared to that, snapshots or anonymous repository access is easy going.
>Finally, most free software and open source projects have standardized on
>CVS. Do we really have a compelling reason to go against the standard?
Perl 5 uses perforce, and perforce is a lot nicer. I don't much care what
the other projects use--that's largely irrelevanyt, and in many ways a
misleading argument. (It's the same sort of argument that pushes MySQL as a
database since "most folks are using it", regarless of its inadequacy for a
task)
Perforce is much nicer for the people who need to manage the repository,
and that's the important thing. We can get easy-enough access to the
repository for the casual hacker and that's fine.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
