SF, cvs and svn

[d'Oursse]

Since one year, I have experienced with Sourceforge a lot of problems when I try to check out a tree (in anonymous as well as a developper). It slow in anonymous, often down. I don't even talk about the fact that anonymous cvs is updated several hours after developper one.

A solution would be to migrate to anothe server. So, why not also try to use svn, instead of cvs. svn as most of the features of cvs, is faster, has more features (possibility to move files, atomic commits, etc...)

A possible server would be videolan. But I regret that the web browsing of its svn trees is disable.

I would like to have the opinion of other dev. Do you think that it is worth migrating to another server (and which one), with svn or not ?

comments and ideas are welcome.

[Manao]

A possible server would be videolan. But I regret that the web browsing of its svn trees is disable.Actually, it isn't : https://trac.videolan.org/x264 ( it's far better than web browsing sourceforge was allowing - when it worked )

Imo, svn is a must compared to cvs ( it's not necessary, but there's no reason to stay with cvs when svn can be used ). There're conversion scripts that allows to keep all the history, so no data get lost.

Which server is a more complicated story. I know only two svn public servers : mplayer and videolan. Videolan might be the more robust one, but I'm no expert there.

[sh0dan]

I would also be very glad if we were able to migrate. SF is so unstable and laggy that it's close to the point of being unuseable.

SF CVS is down way too often. ViewCVS is updated several days after the commits, making it very hard to keep track of changes.

[Bidoche]

I am favor in a migration as well, subversion has features I could have used already (like moving files with revision history).

[IanB]

SF has it's problems, Yes, the most annoying being they only rsync the public CVS to the developer CVS every 4 or so hours. They claim they have a solution in the pipe.

As for downtime as far as large public services I thought they did pretty well. Most recent event the server lost part of the "A" disk, I reported the problem and it was fixed in under an hour. You do report problems don't you?

I'd be concerned not to throw baby out with the bathwater. i.e. The devil you know.

As for SVN I have my doubts, the two most serious are :-

1. All the data is in a massive BerkleyDB database. They don't screw up often but when they do it is certainly fatal. i.e. Restore from backup.

2. The way TAGs and Branches are done (NOT!) really sucks!

See this for a fairly objective comparison SVN vs CVS (http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php), my assessment is both systems suck a bit, CVS 4/10, SVN 3.5/10

[foxyshadis]

If you can give it a month or two sourceforge is unrolling both major cvs updates (finally), including for the webview, and have already started building a SVN network, it's still internal-alpha only right now. The svn will be beta around the turn of the year and public after a couple months.

Weird that SVN doesn't support rollback, but I'm sure it must be a popular request.

[Richard Berg]

Assuming I could set something up (no idea if this is possible), would there be any interest in using VS Team System?

[d'Oursse]

i would like to use something that is platform independant, as I'm working on linux

[Richard Berg]

2. The way TAGs and Branches are done (NOT!) really sucks!
Gotta disagree with you there. SVN uses the same branching model as Perforce, ClearCase, Vault, VS TFS, and basically every other source control tool that's not built on RCS.

(edit)
@d'Oursse - FYI, there will be Linux clients (http://www.teamprise.com/) available. All of SourceGear's other products are free for personal use, so hopefully the same will be true of TeamPrise.

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As cool as it would be to use TFS for Avisynth, I admit the idea comes from selfish interest. I'd like to work on AVS when possible, but I never get around to re-configuring WinCVS & VS6 back the way I had it a few years ago. And it would be great to get some testing done with an internet config -- almost all the testing I do at work is in a Win2k3 corporate domain, which makes some parts of the system work pretty differently than it would with a distributed OSS team. Eventually we want TFS to be the backend of the next version of GotDotNet.com Workspaces so that Windows devs have something that's as helpful (or hopefully, a lot better) than SourceForge is to Linux types.

[IanB]

Gotta disagree with you there. SVN uses the same branching model as Perforce, ClearCase, Vault, VS TFS, and basically every other source control tool that's not built on RCS.Yes, they do not implement RCS branching, it is something different. And there is no tagging equivalent.

[IanB]

Just finished some small surgery on the CVS tree and much to my surprise the changes were replicated into the Web interface and public readonly server within minutes. Looks like SF has pulled their finger out, at least part way ;)

[d'Oursse]

I have already experienced that, but it was only 2 times in 2 years. Not much, imho

[IanB]

Up until today my experience has been the readonly public server was synced every 4 hours on the 4 hours but it often missed the update. If you got your changes in just before an update then they happened apparently very quickly. I have never known it to be any different. The changes I did were spread over 40 minutes and each change propagated quite quickly, there was no 4 hour batching.