Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 11:51:03AM -0500, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
> On Jun 05, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) [jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org] wrote:
> > The only real candidate standing right now is git
> 
> I guess not all the data has probably made it back here.  For all the other
> SCMs we've tried, basic performance and interface has proved a major issue.
> Arwed can speak more to these since he's the one doing most of the
> head-to-head testing, but while SVK is a good bit faster than SVN it's
> still quite slow and unwieldy.

Some more data about that:
SVK is overall pretty usable for us in theory. It does the normal
distributed pull/update/edit/commit/push cycle with only one real
problem, that's the multiplen revision numbers. E.g. a commit I've done
here to my local repository and then pushed to the remote has three
distinct revisions:
$ svk log -r 9133@ //mirror/grimoire.svk
----------------------------------------------------------------------
r9147 (orig r9133):  arwed | 1970-01-01 01:00:00 +0200

 r9141@Otherland:  arwed | 1970-01-01 01:00:00 +0200
 added missing INSTALL file

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This is not a major problem once you're used to it, but basically the
only revision meaningful to others is the orig r9133 one. On the other
hand, if you want to cherry-pick a change, you have to get your _local_
revision, which would be the r9147 above. Overall, a bit confusing.
That said, cherry-picking worked fine for the cases I tried. It had the
same difficulties with merging HISTORY files where several entries were
skipped that git had. I.e. if you have several changes in test, and only
cherry-pick the latest of those, you'll get a conflict in HISTORY that
you have to resolve (p4 is the only system I've seen that doesn't
produce conflicts in that case).
That's about it for the functionality part, nothing vastly better or
worse than git.

Performance is a real problem though. svk status (or really any command)
on a full grimoire branch takes ~15 minutes. That can be reduced by
limiting commands to parts of the tree, like one section or one spell,
but it is a quite serious limitation imho.
The other performance issue is mirroring and updating the repository.
The first mirroring takes hours, later updates are usually fast, but if
there's big changes (like my accidental branch merges a few days ago),
you're back to waiting half an hour for the update to finish.

Since there's nothing functionally much better than git, and git has
much better performance, git is the winner here.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org