[mythtv] 'stable' tag proposal

Yan-Fa Li yanfali at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 17:22:11 UTC 2005


On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 11:52:11 -0500 (EST), andrew burke
<aburke at bitflood.org> wrote:
> >> > You have _not_ offered to help improve the situation.  You've offered
> >> to
> >> > help move to subversion.  That's not the same thing.
> >> >
> >> > Are you now changing your offer?
> >>
> >> What Andrew is proposing would work just fine on CVS as well as
> >> subversion.
> >
> > Of course is will (that's my whole point), but he's not offered to
> > actually _do_ anything before.
> 
> I am not familiar enough with CVS to help you implement my suggestions
> using it.  I _am_ familiar enough with subversion (and perforce, if you
> perhaps want to spend a few hundred dollars a head :) ) to do this stuff.
>

OK, that's a really poor excuse.  SVN is a variant of CVS with a
better atomic design and a database backend.  It's been made
deliberately compatible with CVS to encourage forward movement.  If
you *want* to get good at CVS buy or borrow: Pragmatic Programmer's
Pragmatic Version Control Using CVS.  It's an excellent guide to CVS
and will tell you 90% of what you want to know, the rest you can glean
from cvshome.org.

> Perhaps as a first pass, I could set up a subversion repository and a trac
> installation to give you a preview of how it would look.  Would it be
> possible for me to get a tarball of the cvs repository for import into
> subversion?
>

SVN has a lot to recommend it.  It really does, but it has one primary
drawback.  A lack of decent clients.  Yes you can set up Apache and
DAV access, but these require more resources and a lot of time for
careful administration.  Why don't you just mirror the CVS repository
for a while and show people how good SVN is ?  The proof is in the
action, not the gabbin.  Grabbing the CVS source is easy, instructions
are on the home web page:

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-5.html
 
> Look, I'm really not trying to be an asshole.  I really, really do want to
> help mythtv improve, because I believe it is a very worthwhile piece of
> software.  I see issues with the development process that I have seen
> other places and I am trying to offer a way to improve that process.  I
> know it's not code that i'm contributing, and so it's hard to quantify how
> much good I could/would do, but honestly, I do believe changing some of
> the development policy on this project would improve everyone's lives.

You're a build engineer.  I have a lot of respect for that, it's a
tricky job.  But you've also got a commercial attitude, which comes
from being paid to do it professionally.  Open Source is a lot like
IPv4, a best effort service.  If you can improve the process with your
build skills, I look forward to your contributions.  However, don't
expect people to turn around and do things the way you want because
you only know how to use SVN and Perforce (which btw costs a huge
amount of moola and requires per seat licensing); if you want to use
perforce you might as well call up Larry over at BitKeeper and ask him
for a repository.

Yan


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