Re: Subversion Migration: the importance of maturity.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > 	* Community: We want to be able to plug into an active
> > 	  community, where we can get support and we can benefit from
> > 	  other third party experiences, tricks and information. 
> 
> Usually that's not a big problem in the Free Software world. If it's a
> free software project, you usually have a community around it.

Although your statement is almost true, am sure we can all appreciate
the difference between the extreme of `the community made up of the
author' and `a community of one hundred thousand users' ;-)

The volume of the community matters.

> > 	* Maturity: Arch and Monotone are at the place where Subversion
> > 	  was two or three years ago, when the early adopters were
> > 	  trying out the technology.  And ever since they said `This is
> > 	  usable' in the pre 1.0 day, and even a year ago when 1.0 was
> > 	  released people still had issues and these problems had to be
> > 	  sorted out.
> 
> Well, seems funny that I need to say this, as I suggested the migration
> to Subversion a year ago, but, Arch is around before Subversion got the
> 1.0 release:
> 
> http://regexps.srparish.net/src/tla/
> 
>  tla-1.0.tar.gz          19-Jun-2003 21:25   2.8M  
> 
> While Subversion didn't reach the 1.0 release until 8 months later...
> 
> http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=612
> 
> Don't know about Monotone.

Subversion, being a commercial product was a lot stricter about what
they would be willing to call a "1.0".

> > 	  No matter how great Arch and Monotone are (and they are
> > 	  beautiful) they have just not received enough testing nor have
> > 	  they aged enough to be used for something of the scale of
> > 	  GNOME. 
> 
> Well, Ubuntu is using Arch as part of its development since some months
> ago already and in the near future will be use it much more. GNOME and
> KDE are included into Ubuntu so... I think that's a good stress prove,
> isn't it?

How large is this Ubuntu repository, how many revisions and branches
live in this repository?

I do not know what you guys use the repository for, but you could
probably tell us more:

	* Do you check in the source code for every program that you 
	  ship in Ubuntu into arch, and maintain all of the branches?

	  If this is the case, this is a pretty big respository.

	* Or do you use Arch/Bazar just to check in the build files
	  that drive the build?

	  If this is the case, then it seems like a very small
	  repository

The Mono repository holds 1.6 gigabytes of data.

> > 	* User base: only as a function of the previous maturity
> > 	  component: how many large projects have adopted Arch? 
> > 	  Monotone? and Subversion?
> 
> I cannot give you a list of the projects that are using them.
> 
> > 
> > 	  How many lines of code are maintained by those adopters in
> > 	  each case?
> 
> No idea of numbers.

Lets find that information, because this has all the signs of a red flag
to me.  If there are no large deployments, then Arch has not been
hardened enough. 

> Yeah, there are 17 links to projects, but, for instance, the whole
> Debian project is not using Subversion, only a part of it, others are
> using Arch and I'm sure there are others that are using other ways to
> handled the code.

Ok, lets scratch Debian.  We still have Apache, Samba, KDE and Mono.

> Arch has also, at least, one company that I'm aware of, I think there
> are more, but I'm not sure.

Lets get the data then.  I have provided the data on the Subversion side. 

We cant pull a Rumsfeld and just say `Lets go Arch because there are
known unknowns and unknown unknowns and we know that Ubuntu is using it'.

> > 	* Subversion has a full time staff of developers working around
> > 	  the clock to bug fix subversion and maintain regression test
> > 	  cases.
> 
> Arch has also developers working on it at full time.

Lets get numbers: how many.

Subversion has 8 full time employees that have been working full time
since 2000, and they are employed by Collab.NET that specializes on
this. 

Miguel