Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD Begins Switch to Subversion

Posted by timothy on from the subvert-the-dominant-paradigm dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Project has begun the switch of its source code management system from CVS to Subversion. At this point in time, FreeBSD's developers are making changes to the base system in the Subversion repository. We have a replication system in place that exports our work to the legacy CVS tree on a continuous basis. People who are using our extensive CVS based distribution network (including anoncvs, CVSup, cvsweb, ftp) will not be interrupted by our work-in-progress. We are committed to maintaining the existing CVS based distribution system for at least the support lifetime of all existing 'stable' branches. Security and errata patches will continue to be made available in their usual CVS locations."

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:GIT? by bark · · Score: 5, Informative

    They don't use git because FreeBSD development has traditionally been "centralized". They use a model where patches are fed to a group of core developers with "commit permission" to the tree, and all source changes are vetted and fed through that funnel. Subversion's centralized source control methodology works well with the FreeBSD development process, and the decentralized aspects of git is not needed.

    However, of course, there is still some distributed coding going on at the edges, but they tend to be peripheral and experimental. The developers working on these experimental branches can choose to use whatever source control system they wish. Many FreeBSD developers prefer perforce for their experimental work, but they can use git or mercurial if they wish.

  2. Re:GIT? by LurkerXXX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Subversion has an Apache/BSD type license. GIT does not.

  3. Oh really? by krog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thanks for promptly settling the SCM dispute! Now I'd love to hear your ideas on which text editor is the best.

    --
    Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
    1. Re:Oh really? by 0xABADC0DA · · Score: 5, Funny

      VI lost the editor war early on. Its focus on text files with little to no support for email or shell prompts or playing text-mode hangman made it unpopular. That's a situation that has changed (somewhat), but the stigma is still attached to it. Which is not really a problem. VI was developed to meet the needs of text editing. If it happens to meet the needs of other activities, great. If it doesn't, that's just as fine.

      In any case, EMACS ended up being the "best of breed" solution. It offered all the features of the competing editors, was portable across platforms, had a significant tools (and games) appear practically overnight, and is used by HUGE OSS icons like RMS. I've used it in my own projects and have found that it is much easier and more dynamic than the classic, command/insert model of VI.

      har, har...