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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."
"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."
They forget those of us who have never heard of it before.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
Interview with Tom, Lord of Arch Revision System
# cd /usr/srcr oot
# export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.gnuarch.org:/usr/cvs
# cvs login - the password is anoncvs.
# cvs checkout arch
* Per Incident
* Subscription
* Deployment Services
* Custom Development
that they're considering starting Support services soon. As a Configuration Management guy at a fairly large company, one of the reasons major corporations choose commercial version control software (Rational ClearCase, etc) over the open source counterparts (CVS, etc) is primarily due to lack of formal support.
I'm all for open source and even dislike it when companies reject Linux because of "lack of support" (this is ofcourse changing with RedHat's efforts), but experience has taught me that not everybody in a large organization is a hacker and willing to figure out the intricacies incase something goes wrong. They'd rather pay for a service contract incase anything goes wrong.
And ofcourse, there's also the accountability angle (which I dislike) to it, when you're using the version control software to develop critical/huge amount of bread-and-butter software - companies want to be able to have someone to point fingers at incase something messes up.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
Tom Lord sounds like he got his argumentation skills by watching Beavis and Butthead, reading JeffK, and getting into flame wars with trolls on /.
Q: What's wrong with Subversion?
A: It sucks.
Q: What's wrong with CVS?
A: It sucks.
Q: Can you be more specific about Subversion?
A: Yes. Subversion is teh suck. I realize that's a little inflamatory, so let me say that the sky is blue, dogs are hairy, and Subversion is TEH SUCK, fagg0t!!11
Q: Can you be more specific about CVS?
A: Yes, allow me to be more specific. It sux0rs. Hard. CVS is teh sux0r.
Q: What's good about Arch?
A: It rules. Also, I have a large penis. Fagg0t.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Tom Lord has tried to work more closely with other revision control packages before (including the subversion team) but he has been hampered by his complete and total lack of people skills. I don't think he tries to, but he ends up offending everyone he tries to have a "discussion" with. Its comical and sad at the same time.
The good things about arch is:
The first two are why I use arch. The bad things are
Oh yeah, the development has just sun-flared just when it had begun starting up again. A huge flame war (where Tom's primary contribution seemed to be "Grow up", "You're childish" and worse) arch is now without a release manager, and understandable nobody wants to take that role.
In short, arch has great promise, but needs some drastic changes.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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.
Hi,
I (Larry McVoy) have looked over Darcs, Monotone, Arch, Codeville, and I think some others that I can't remember and I can easily say that no, they haven't discovered much of what we have done.
Let's take darcs as an example. It's a cool system if you are a math or physics person. You can write proofs about how it works, much like BitKeeper. We like that and applaud anyone who is thinking that hard (and if you are looking for a job please come talk to us, we are always hiring). However, darcs suffers from the math problem. It's all about math and not at all about being pragmatic. Here's a for instance. The BitKeeper tree holding the 2.6 kernel has about 55,000 changesets. A null update using BK is 4 seconds (which is insanely slow in our opinion). Try doing the same thing with darcs and you will wait and wait and wait... That's just the first example of how it doesn't scale. The openlogging tree for linux is somewhere north of 110,000 changesets. *All* other systems die with that sort of load. We're slow but we work and we know how to fix the slow part.
This problem space is strange, it is part math and part pragmatism. You have to do both and darcs does one of them. And it does it in only one of the areas, there are many many more. Repository synchronization, rename handling, merging, user interface, installation tools, working well on Windows as well as Unix, etc., etc.
Our payroll is higher than any open source SCM system has generated by a factor of 50. It's higher than the reiserfs payroll, it's higher than lots of well known little companies doing useful stuff. It's high because there are lots and lots of corner cases *in addition* to the hard math stuff which needs to be done.
Since we're talking about Arch, here's another example: we recently got a commercial customer who tried out arch on windows and came back and told us BK was at least 10x faster. And we told him that we think BK is way too slow on Windows. He liked that. The point being is that it isn't just about architecture, or licensing, or features, it's about a lot of not-so-fun stuff and that's why a commercial answer will always be better than a free answer. It costs a lot of money to solve the non-fun problems. Open source solves the fun problems (extremely well, I might add) but unless the project is very visible (i.e., the kernel) it starts to fall down when you hit the non-fun problems. Think about it - if noone is paying you money or telling that you rock while you are doing the grunt work - how long are you going to do that? Not very long, just look at 90% of the "projects" on sourceforge, all talk, no code.
It's worth repeating that last bit. SCM is an undervalued field. Every engineer thinks that they can reproduce what BK does with a few scripts wrapped around CVS or RCS. While they may think that it flies in the face of the over 100 man years we have in BK and we know we are nowhere near good enough. The bummer is that the perception is that this stuff is easy but the reality is that it is hard. Both technically hard and detail hard. It's way more work than people think. But precisely because people don't value it, that's why the only real answer is a commercial answer. Yeah, yeah, you all love to give me crap because BK isn't GPLed but *none* of you have put in 1/10th as much effort as I have or have made 1/10th as much of a difference in this space. Talk is cheap, show me a better answer and I'll be impressed. It won't happen because it costs way way way too much money to deliver a better answer. How's the arch installer on windows? Graphical? Is it careful about not screwing up the registry? Can you have two different versions installed at the same time? What about the transport layers? Works over http? Really? Through all the wacky proxies out there? You get the idea, right?
That's why all this discussion of arch or darcs or whatever is just nonsense. You all think this stuff is easy so you are never going to cough up the $30M or so it will take to solve it right. Sad but true. I guess it's good for us, it means we have a market, but it would be nice if you knew a bit more about the topic. I love it every time it comes up, the world is definitely becoming more aware at least.
--lm