| Subject | Re: source control - marion etc |
|---|---|
| Author | David Warnock |
| Post date | 2000-01-26T12:31:56Z |
Reed,
Thanks for the insights into practice at Interbase.
So far as I can see the three most likely options at present are
1. Return to marion, make it open source (and this could be done much
sooner than IB 6.0 as it is not a for sale product so there are not the
same commercial concerns).
2. Keep Marion for internal use and mirror to CVS for the wider
community.
3. Migrate fully to CVS (or another tool if preferred).
For me the least sound of these options is 2. Like many compromises if
keeps all the bad points of options 1 and 3 without adding any
significantly +ve ones in their place. I find it extremely significant
that Reed says "My feeling is that a solution which mirrors (both ways)
between marion and CVS (or any two source control systems) is not a very
good idea." Unlike the rest of us Reed has real experience with Marion,
the IB code and mirroring two version control systems - it would be
crazy to go against that experience.
For option 1 there seem to be 3 key positive points
- Ann's point about eating our own DogFood.
- David Schnepper's point about using the change history. Cvs in
particular does not know about sets of updates (it is file changes not
session changes) so you might loose some functionality by switching to
CVS.
- If marion were open sourced before IB 6 then it might form a good
place to build the IB open source community and to work out how we work
together before starting on the real project.
Against that the negative points are
- work on marion might divert open source resources away from developing
IB 6
- it seems there is a lot of work that needs doing to marion and a lot
of missing features
Suggestion
It seems to me that the key advantage of marion is the ability to seach
the changelogs in sql.
Would it be possible to move completely to cvs except add some server
scripts fired by the commits which commit to marion. Then use marion
just for the read only searching that david suggests. I mean much less
than the mirroring concept. Nobody would commit or checkout in marion,
all access to the real code would be via cvs. But marion would continue
to provide the search capabilities that it seems cvs lacks.
David
Thanks for the insights into practice at Interbase.
So far as I can see the three most likely options at present are
1. Return to marion, make it open source (and this could be done much
sooner than IB 6.0 as it is not a for sale product so there are not the
same commercial concerns).
2. Keep Marion for internal use and mirror to CVS for the wider
community.
3. Migrate fully to CVS (or another tool if preferred).
For me the least sound of these options is 2. Like many compromises if
keeps all the bad points of options 1 and 3 without adding any
significantly +ve ones in their place. I find it extremely significant
that Reed says "My feeling is that a solution which mirrors (both ways)
between marion and CVS (or any two source control systems) is not a very
good idea." Unlike the rest of us Reed has real experience with Marion,
the IB code and mirroring two version control systems - it would be
crazy to go against that experience.
For option 1 there seem to be 3 key positive points
- Ann's point about eating our own DogFood.
- David Schnepper's point about using the change history. Cvs in
particular does not know about sets of updates (it is file changes not
session changes) so you might loose some functionality by switching to
CVS.
- If marion were open sourced before IB 6 then it might form a good
place to build the IB open source community and to work out how we work
together before starting on the real project.
Against that the negative points are
- work on marion might divert open source resources away from developing
IB 6
- it seems there is a lot of work that needs doing to marion and a lot
of missing features
Suggestion
It seems to me that the key advantage of marion is the ability to seach
the changelogs in sql.
Would it be possible to move completely to cvs except add some server
scripts fired by the commits which commit to marion. Then use marion
just for the read only searching that david suggests. I mean much less
than the mirroring concept. Nobody would commit or checkout in marion,
all access to the real code would be via cvs. But marion would continue
to provide the search capabilities that it seems cvs lacks.
David