On Thursday 24 February 2005 13:30, Paul Smith wrote: > Does anyone know the driving reason behind the, err, eventual mandatory > conversion to SVN? �I know CVS has some limitations, but.... �Is it just > easier on Infrastructure? �Security? Performance? �The reasons on the > SVN main page don't seem that compelling to me.
The official story is; 1. Better and easier management for infrastructure, as well as projects who can define finer granularity of access rights to various parts of the codebase. 2. The infrastructure team has a long-term goal of getting rid of shell accounts for committers. Subversion allows that, CVS doesn't (or so I have been told). The reason for removal of shell accounts is said to be "security". 3. History preservation which is both extremely fragile process (i.e. copy directories around in the file system) as well as doesn't work well, e.g. a deleted file with a name that is later re-used in the same directory, becomes part of the first files history. Also, CVS use of directories makes some repositories slow and I/O intensive. I also think that a much better incremental backup solution is possible (not sure if fully implemented yet), where each commit updates the backup. There are probably other reasons as well.
