Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Nathan Yergler" <nathan AT creativecommons.org>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Mike Linksvayer
<ml AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Nathan Yergler
>  <nathan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
>  > Creative Commons has hosted our source repository at Sourceforge.net
>  >  for several years.  Recently there's been an increase in the number of
>  >  outages and problems with the repository.  At a tech team meeting this
>  >  morning we discussed the possibility of moving the source repository
>  >  from sourceforge to a CC server.  Note that we're only dealing with
>  >  the source repository at this point; bug tracking, etc will remain at
>  >  Sourceforge.
>
>  Consider this a message from a random kook.
>
>  If making that transition, why not dump svn altogether for git or bzr?

A couple of reasons.  First, we currently make extensive use of
svn:externals to stitch together different parts of the repository.
In looking at DVCS systems I haven't seen one that handled something
like svn:externals, so making that sort of transition would require
additional thought about how to handle code deployment sanely.
Second, in my experimentation with DVCS it seems them work best with
one repository-per-project; for example, I don't think there's a way
to checkout one particular folder in the repository -- you clone the
entire thing.  That would also require considerably more effort to
split the repository into many since we almost certainly don't want to
clone the *entire* cc tools repository just to work on, say,
liblicense.  Additionally the goal here is to just inject stability
into the infrastructure; by keeping svn (at least for existing
projects) we have a clean way to switch over working copies.

Finally, we're probably going to start using something like git, bzr
or hg for some projects, but that decision is orthogonal to this one.

NRY

>
>  Mike
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