Re: Subversion Migration: the importance of maturity.



On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 13:44 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 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.

Of course, and I don't know the monotone case, but cvs, subversion and
arch have communities bigger than just the author :-)

> 
> > > 	* 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".

Hmmm, I don't know about tla as I didn't know about the project at that
point, but I think that usually a free software project takes much more
time to reach a 1.0 release than non free software projects so I don't
think that because "subversion is a commercial product" took much more
time to be a 1.0 release means it's better than other thing because it
also happens in non commercial products...


> 
> > > 	  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?

Ubuntu is importing into arch all free software products that exists in
its archives so the developers can handle patches with arch easily.

> 
> 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.

We are doing this. It's not yet finished but is a work in progress. But
I think we are not importing all branches, only the main ones. I'm not
involved in this task so I don't know all the details but
http://arch.ubuntu.com is where the imports into Arch are published.


> 
> 	* 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.

I don't have access to the server that has all Ubuntu archives but as
you can guess, if Ubuntu imports all packages it ships will be much more
bigger than 1.6GB...



> > > 	* 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. 

We are using it a lot, every time more.

http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/HctPackageCollaboration

That tool will be used to maintain the packages in Ubuntu, and it uses
Arch to do the version control.


> 
> > 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'.

Well, I know that Debian and some GNOME products are already using Arch.
Ubuntu is finishing the deployment to start using it a lot and thus any
derivative will use it also (like KUbuntu and Guadalinex)

About others using Arch:

http://www.rhythmbox.org/development.html
http://pybliographer.org/development/download
http://wiki.linuxbios.org/index.php/Download_freebios_v2
http://www.mico.org/down.html
http://www.vim.org/arch.php
http://lists.initd.org/pipermail/psycopg-announce/2002-October/000028.html
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fdebrix
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile-gnome/dev/
http://www.freespiders.org/projects/gmlview/dev.php
http://mirrors.sourcecontrol.net/
http://mirrors.gnuarch.org/

There is even a port of Linux kernel using Arch:

http://linuxsh.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/Getting_20source

I cannot give you more information because as I said, I'm only a user of
Arch, but I'm sure you can find more projects using google.



> > > 	* 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. 

I don't have those details, sorry.

Cheers.

> 
> Miguel
-- 
Carlos Perelló Marín
Ubuntu Hoary (PowerPC)  => http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Linux Registered User #121232
mailto:carlos pemas net || mailto:carlos gnome org
http://carlos.pemas.net
Valencia - Spain

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]