Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 08:30:16 +0100 From: Max Laier <max@love2party.net> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: kientzle@freebsd.org, perryh@pluto.rain.com Subject: Re: keeping track of local modifications Message-ID: <200812010830.17259.max@love2party.net> In-Reply-To: <49337f04.p8QqvfzTga07ypa6%perryh@pluto.rain.com> References: <4931CB02.9070904@gmail.com> <4932E8CF.9040501@freebsd.org> <49337f04.p8QqvfzTga07ypa6%perryh@pluto.rain.com>
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On Monday 01 December 2008 07:07:00 perryh@pluto.rain.com wrote: > Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org> wrote: > > ... most of us are volunteers who enjoy using and working on > > FreeBSD in our (often quite limited) spare time ... If I only > > have a couple of hours a week, I'd usually rather spend it coding > > ... > > Sounds familiar :) > > Getting back to the OP's original question, and in light of the > limited time that many of us have available, I was wondering which of > the readily-available VCS would impose the least overhead on someone > who has very little experience with any open source VCS (and thus is > going to have to learn *something* new). After looking at the pages > recommended by others in this thread, I wonder if there are other > possibilities which one should consider. > > * http://wiki.freebsd.org/SubversionPrimer > > I got the impression that SVN is quite resource-hungry, both in > disk space and in bandwidth, and has an extremely steep learning > curve. While a committer clearly has to deal with SVN, I was left > wondering if it really had much to offer the more casual hacker, > esp. one who is not already familiar with it. In particular, given > that one will likely have already installed /usr/src/... from the > distribution, I was put off by the apparent need to download > another entire instance. > > * http://wiki.freebsd.org/LocalMercurial > > This seems less of a resource hog, and (if I am understanding > matters correctly) is able to start from the installed /usr/src/... > rather than requiring the would-be hacker to download a redundant > instance, but I was concerned that the page may not be up to date > with current FreeBSD development methodology (e.g. csup vs cvsup). If you want to contribute back, this is *not* the way to go. Patches from anything other than SVN and maybe CVS are mostly useless. The local hg/git approach is nice if you are already familiar with hg or git and just want to keep some patch sets for yourself. If you are looking to keep/develop a patch set and eventually share it with the world, svn or svk is the way to go. Yes, a full svk mirror takes up 3.5g of space, but that's not even two bucks at today's storage costs. The issue with the initial setup is a different thing, but once that is done (at your local university, employer, or the like) svn/svk is really resource efficient. On top of that you will find that "svn ann" is a very powerful tool to figure out why a certain line of code is the way it is (much more pleasant to use than cvsweb, too - esp. when you are on a slow network connection). So it really depends on what your goal is. If you are (as the OP) looking to contribute back to the community, there is really no way around svn - sorry. If you are looking for some means to store your favorite patches from the lists and some of your own, the local hg/git stuff might be a better fit. > In case it makes any difference, I've used SCCS and RCS a little (but > neither all that recently), and have been using ClearCase a great > deal for the last several years (but it is not a candidate for this > inquiry since I'm not licensed to use it outside the office). No idea about ClearCase, but SCCS and RCS are not too far away from SVN ... natural progression. -- /"\ Best regards, | mlaier@freebsd.org \ / Max Laier | ICQ #67774661 X http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/ | mlaier@EFnet / \ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | Against HTML Mail and News
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