[H-GEN] CVS is very very slow ...

[Greg Black]

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David Seikel wrote:

|  --- Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote: 
| > I have one additional data point.  I only use CVS over SSH and I
| > am always astonished at just how slow it is -- in my case, this
| > is certainly not caused by DNS lookups or anything like that.
| > In fact, the performance is so sucky that I plan to migrate all
| > my software repository back to RCS with some scripting and make
| > rules to replace the functionality of CVS.
| 
| If you are migrating anyway, why not go forward instaed of backward?  I'm
| currently looking at subversion, which is being designed as a replacement
| for CVS, one which doesn't suck quite so much.  Subversion uses an Apache
| server with WEBDAV to access the repository over the net.  It versions
| whole projects at once, rather than one file at once.  It sends only the
| diffs across the network, and can deal with binary diffs.

I'd be hard-pressed to think of Apache as a step forward from
CVS, and from what I've heard of subversion to date, I'd say it
was ages away from being ready for prime time.  I do agree that
we (meaning the software community) need something that's an
order of magnitude better than the current tools for version
control -- but it's a non-trivial problem to design such a beast
and it's going to be difficult to get enough buy-in from the
user community to move development forward in the common open
source methodology.

It's my guess that the only good replacement system will come
from a single developer who has the time and ability to design
it and the stamina to get it working on his own.  Such a tool
could then be adopted by the wider development community as it
evolves, but that would just be the icing on the cake.

Greg

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