Moving Away From CVS: A Vote

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 09/05/2009 03:43 PM, Bill Barry wrote:
> There is significant fear that bazaar will break compatibility in
> upgrades (it has already done so before).

	The fear is unfounded. Bazaar has never actually *broken compatibility* 
in its upgrades--at least not that I recall since 1.0. However, if 
administrators of bzr servers choose to convert their repositories to a 
format that older versions of Bazaar don't support, then it's true that 
older versions of Bazaar can no longer access those repositories.

	There would probably be a decision made when we switch to bzr what 
repository format we were going to use, and then we'd stick with it 
until such a time as all reasonably available versions of bzr supported 
a newer repository format (most likely several years). Also, it's 
looking like the 2a format may indeed be the last word in formats--we'll 
see. At the least, the packs format is good enough for what we do with 
Bugzilla, so we may not ever have to change.

> * Bzr has a new release every month because it finds major deficiencies
> every month.

	Not really. Read the release notes and see.

 > It also doesn't have minor releases

	Not true, it's had some minor releases. See the release notes. There 
was a 1.6.1, as an example.

> * The mercurial commands are not significantly different than CVS or SVN.

	Except that last time I checked, Mercurial lacks built-in support for 
bound branches--the fundamental CVS/SVN workflow (that you commit back 
to the branch you checked out from with a "commit" command).

> As far as superiority: last I checked over 90% of the commits to Bzr
> were from 2 or 3 people employed by Canonical. There literally was not a
> developer community.

	Here's the current list of top contributors to bzr:

	https://launchpad.net/bazaar/+topcontributors

	(Looking at the "Bazaar Branches" section will limit it to just code 
contributors.)

> see a testopia repository
> that keeps up to date with the changes as they happen).

	That would depend more upon somebody committing development resources 
to Testopia than a VCS switch, although switching to a DVCS would 
certainly have some advantages. I agree it would be nice, though. :-)

	-Max
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