Interview with Tom Lord of Arch Revision System

comforteagle writes "Every revision control system has its supporters and detractors, but none is as polar as Arch. Either you hate it or think it is the best thing in revision control ever. Built more around what our beloved kernel hackers use (BK), Arch is definitely a departure from CVS and Subversion. I've interviewed Tom Lord, Arch's daddy, about the application, and he has some -ahem- interesting answers and opinions."

Comments

All that and he doesn't explain...

[omaha]

I use subversion and have been on the lists for a couple of years now. Tom Lord has been to those lists as well. In all those times, including this one, he has never explained how arch is better. For the lead developer to be unable to communicate the rasion d'etre for a project in a way that makes others curious is not a good thing.

Primarily, he has only flamed svn. Even this interview he talked more about svn than arch. Nothing he said raised any interest in me to look at arch.

Also, his criticism of svn's current backend was true 8 months ago. There is another backend that will be available soon. And with that, the sytem will be able to handle additonal backends in good form.

SVK, which Lord mentioned, is a feather in svn's hat since it uses subversion as a base. If distributed mode is a real need I would suggest looking at BK or svk.

Re:All that and he doesn't explain...

[SpootFinallyRegister]

this interview contribures nothing. almost all of his comments about subversion seem to be of the "you suck!" variety; plenty of emotion, not much fact. on the points he did make:

Subversion requires a fairly heavyweight server

i run a subversion repository on a FreeBSD system with a Duron 600 and 128Mb of memory, and the upstream link is only 128kbps dsl. subversion runs as smooth as silk, locally and remotely. i do not consider this to be a heavyweight server.

The implementation is too complicated, the use of BDB as the primary back end creates admin hassles... managing database log files and backups

somewhat true. i dont like the fact that subversion is currently tightly bound to BDB and Apache, but this is purely behind the scenes -- subversion's implementation can (and i imagine will) be evolved to support many backends, and issues with BDB are just issues with BDB. i dont think its fair to expect subversion to be fully open and support all sorts of databases and file systems for its backend at 1.06. furthermore, evolution of the implementation can be done so that old repositories still work fine with a new version, the new version has the option to use a dfferent backend, and most importantly, there will be absolutely no difference for user whatsoever.

having to run a recovery process or worse on the server whenever it fail

recovering a corrupted database of filesystem is never fun. nobody looks forward to running fsck. however, Lord makes this sound like a common operation for whenever something fails -- clearly, he has never typed the words svn help cleanup. when user operations go bad, it doesnt corrupt the repository, and recovery isnt necessary. any problems created by an interrupted operation affect only the working copy, and can be fixed with a simple svn cleanup.

the poor merging support

Lord references the poor merging support a few times, but fails to actually detail a complaint. branching as a copy is just a clean intuitive manner to visualize a new branch off of the current line, and one that works with his precious named identifiers instead of version numbers as well. the merging is a little different than cvs, but is as good at worst. if Lord can go off on "Arch is great (you just have to learn all about it and configure your environment in just the right way)", i would think he would leave some leeway for subversion requiring a user to have at least a general birds eye view of its operation.

overall, this interview is like a political campaign that only attacks. i do not see any arguments in the text of "arch is better in this area because...", i only see "XXX is bad for the other guys." i've always taken the same view of these campaigns: if he had substance to support his product, he would have given it to us.

and in finale, he uses the final paragraph to make excuses for arch having most of the same shortcomings he lists for other revision control systems.

in all honesty, i am not familiar with arch. if arch does things better than subversion, i would love to hear it; and i am not claiming here that subversion is better. i can't, since i dont know arch. Lord would have been wise to use this interview as a forum to tell us about arch, and tell us why its good, but he didnt, and he has unfortunately turn my view on arch from neutral to maybe a little negative by virtue of jerkitude.

i take one overall feeling from this interview, due to its lack of content and vitriolic but often uninformed attacks. Tom Lord, who are you trying to fool?

I want to thank the Subversion team

[MemoryDragon]

Although this is an Arch thread, after these rantings by Tom Lord (geeze does he really need to bash other projects without any serious explanation every time he gives an interview) For the wonderful CVS replacement they made. I used SVN for half a year in my last job, and the thing never gave me any serious trouble. From the day it reached 1.0 there was at least a basic integration support there, and the mailing lists are well moderated. Thanks Subversion team for the excellent program you delivered, you dont deserve Tom Lords constant bashing. But back to Arch, everybody knows it is a good program, all it needs is better tool integration. The problem has been existing for years.