On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 11:37:58AM -0700, Micah Dowty wrote:
> I just spent some more time reading the documentation for svn and for arch.
> It looks like arch's main advantage over svn is its handling of branches,
> according to the docs. However, it also says arch is a collection of shell
> scripts and C code, which seems like it would be flimsy and unportable.
>
> On this page, it says that arch is very slow on cygwin, and doesn't work on
> OS X or 64-bit platforms:
> http://www.fifthvision.net/open/bin/view/Arch/BitKeeper
Arch is actually very good (I tried it this morning and will probably adopt
it internally); I wouldn't call it "flimsy". However, it *is* unportable;
absolutely no-go on any platform that doesn't have a bourne shell.
That said the site is outdated, I read in the list archives that it works on
OSX already. If you have one or two free hours and want a good laugh, I
recommend going over the archives for January, it's better than Will&Grace.
Arch has IMHO one *major* advantage: you don't have to use it at all.
<explanation>
The repository is structured on two different kinds of versions: a release
and a revision. Releases are stored as regular tarballs (therefore you can
use the Arch repository as your main download location; it is also easily
mirrorable). Revisions are stored as patchsets (essentially a diff file on
steroids). So if you're an end-user you just use the tarballs. If you want
to track development revisions, all you need is GNU patch and one single
script from Arch (dopatch). If you want do do your own development, you
could get Arch, but if it doesn't work on your system you could get away
with GNU diff and one single script from Arch (mkpatch).
</explanation>
So, I'm not sure portability is an issue.
What I think could hurt us is that Arch is pretty much a moving target, with
two different leaders developing in different directions. But if this turns
out to be an issue, we could fix it by sticking to the latest known-working
version of Arch (and perhaps storing it ourselves for users to download).
I'm still evaluating it, but I *really* like its design and hackability. I
recommend installing and evaluating it before you discard it. As an
excercise, import the whole pgui source tree and try to move stuff around to
the new layout.
One bad thing is that there isn't yet a way to import the existing cvs
repository (with past history) into arch, while I heard there is something
named cvs2svn that does this for svn, albeit imperfectly (potentially).
[]s,
|alo
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