On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 12:14:17AM -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".
Bradley, your argument against perforce really sounds like you're saying
your uncomfortable with non-free software in general, not with perforce
in particular. I haven't heard a reason to switch to CVS yet[*].
> 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.
There's a p4 client in the FreeBSD ports tree, and if I were to check my
FreeBSD 4.1 distribution set which arrived yesterday, I'd probably find
a package all ready to install. No, it's not a souce distribution, but
it's bundled with FreeBSD in the same way that python, Gnome and qmail are.
> Also, what if people want to learn how the source system works on their own,
> and experiment with it?
http://www.perforce.com has freely downloadable clients and 2-user
servers. Most people learn how to use CVS on local repositories, and
I don't see why Perforce would be any different.
> 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.
People shouldn't be playing around in the Perl repository to learn
Perforce.
And 100 users is a *lot*. Many free software projects are running
CVS with fewer than 100 users with write access to the repository,
and a mechanism for a random contributor to submit patches and
contributions without having write access. Why should Perl be any
different?
Z.
[*] The biggest reason IMNSHO to use CVS is to encourage people
to hack the source; more people know and use CVS on a daily basis
than use perforce, at least in the free software community.
That said, maintaining a mirror in CVS would accomplish that
for anonymous access, as would a perforce-to-CVS gateway.
Both approaches are being discussed.
