>
> From: David Warnock <david@...>
> Subject: Re: source control - marion etc
>

[...]

>
> 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.
>

I do have to qualify my statment above. I was specifically
refering to automatic mirroring. If NewCO uses marion,
and some outside developers keep their source in CVS (or clearcase
or, god forbid, MS source safe), this is not a big deal, as long as
the medium of interchange is patches that are applied with human
supervision. Dave Schnepper also mentioned CVS used during the first
LIBS project. I started at IB after that was over, so I can't say how
well it worked, but my expirience is that a one way mirror
(so for example all checkins are made into marion, and nightly
updates are made to another system) is trivial, but a two way
mirror is asking for trouble.

>
> 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.
>

I don't know how CVS works with respect to integrating it
with external tools, but this sould like it could be an excellent
open source project using IB.

As Dave Schnepper and Doug Chamberlin have pointed out,
this is probably not too big of a concern for the short
term (IE 6.0). Since 6.0 was already in feature freeze before
this started, I think the biggest contributions from outside
will be in tracking down bugs. But, since theres not much
the rest of us can do until NewCO actually appears, it makes
sense to be as prepared as we can for the the future.


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