OpenBSD Journal

Interview with Joris Vink about OpenCVS

Contributed by jolan on from the finally-something-not-about-wth dept.

Wijnand Wiersma writes:

On NedBSD you can read an interview with OpenCVS developer Joris Vink. The interview is mostly about OpenCVS and it's future. Probably a interesting read for some of you.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Alan Post (65.19.19.54) aisa@cybermesa.com on http://livejournal.com/users/aisa0/

    before subversion 1.0, i eagerly awaited it to be complete, expecting openbsd would migrate to if for no other reason than the licensing issue.

    but the the apache licensing issue hit, which affected the apr library that subversion uses.

    still, i'm not sure openbsd would have moved to subversion anyway. it doesn't quite jive with the relatively conservative "do it once, do it right" mindset.

    i'm interested to see how opencvs develops, as i have enjoyed so far the amount of gpl code that has been removed from the tree. as the openbsd team usually integrates the work they do in projects like this with the base system, it will be interested to see that play out too.

    authentication and validation are a good start, but there is always room for encryption/signing/hashing and general repository security too.

    Comments
    1. By phessler (208.201.244.164) on

      openbsd would have *never* moved to subversion. this has been declared multiple times.

      Comments
      1. By Alan Post (204.89.131.79) aisa@cybermesa.com on http://livejournal.com/users/aisa0/

        right. one of those discussions starts here:

        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-tech&m=111763854126700&w=2

        but to summarize, too big, too slow, too insecure, way too much effort to transition a project the size of openbsd. plus we would have to add gpl code on top of that.


        i don't see openbsd's experience as being all that unique. i was excited to hear about subversion and have it reach 1.0, but people i've spoken with have been less than enthusiastic about the result.

        i find it unfortunate, because i think there was an opprotunity squandered here.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (65.96.221.40) on

        Yeah, but he could've asked about OpenBSD including Postfix by default so we'd have to go through that for the 4000th time. Haven't seen one of those in a while...

    2. By Anonymous Coward (68.63.157.203) on

      Subversion needs to relax its build dependencies, they are too specific and too rigid, making it all but impossible to install subversion on a server that has other tasks running.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (68.202.43.80) on

        Maybe that used to be true, but not anymore. APR comes with the release tarball and is built automatically. Neon is only needed if you want DAV support for Apache. You don't need BDB if you prefer the repository to live in the filesystem. libz and OpenSSL are dependencies of neon only for https and compression, obviously.

        So you only need the libraries that provide the extra functionality you want. Makes sense to me.

        Technically, SVN blows CVS away. It's really too bad about the licensing issues, and that removes the biggest open source competitor to CVS. Sad as it is, reimplementing CVS may be the most efficient solution to getting away from ancient, bit-rotted GNU implementation.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (63.119.50.193) on

          Maybe that used to be true, but not anymore.

          It was true for me as of last week, and I was just trying to build a version that uses svnserve and fsfs, nothing fancy. SVN needs to continue relaxing the build dependencies.

          Technically, SVN blows CVS away.

          If you can build it, yes.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (68.202.43.80) on

            Ok then, exactly what dependency was tripping you up?

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (68.63.157.203) on

              I don't remember the exact problem from last week. Over the weekend I wiped the disk, reinstalled the OS and SVN. That worked.

              Comments
              1. By Anonymous Coward (82.236.141.3) on

                Do you wipe the disk and reinstall the OS everytime something does not install ?

                Comments
                1. By Anonymous Coward (68.63.157.203) on

                  This was the first time I felt the need to do so. Perhaps I was overly frustrated with trying to get a working copy of SVN.

          2. By Anonymous Coward (200.212.63.10) on

            > > Technically, SVN blows CVS away.
            > If you can build it, yes.

            Dammit! if it's so then why the other people asking "why not openSVN" get's a "because no." answer?

    3. By Anonymous Coward (194.7.26.2) on

      Humppa!

    4. By Anonymous Coward (193.209.143.130) on

      How about openSVN? (or openAPR if SVN has enough good license?)

      Comments
      1. By Alan Post (204.89.131.79) aisa@cybermesa.com on http://livejournal.com/users/aisa0/

        as one other commentor mentioned, openbsd has stated they aren't moving to subversion. i'm not sure why this is, but it isn't my call to make.

        i think technically one could "replace" the apr dependency. you would just check out from cvs right before the license switch and build from there. it wouldn't be a big deal.

        but clearly there are other issues at work for accepting svn.

        Comments
        1. By Jean-Francois Brousseau (24.203.229.224) on

          Instead of asking why the team isn't moving to Subversion, you should start by asking "why would we move to another version control system?". Just because it is newer doesn't mean it's better. And sure, it has a bunch of features that could be useful, but far from necessary. OpenBSD development has been using CVS for the past 10 years without anyone complaining about lack of certain features; most of the complaints are related to bugs in cvs, and I doubt that SVN has less bugs, considering the age of both pieces of software.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (83.129.42.165) on

    So-so journaling FS.... ;-)

  3. By Marc Espie (62.212.102.210) espie@openbsd.org on

    Very much an empty interview.

    It's not like it contains any information that isn't more or less publically available elsewhere...

    Is anyone else peeved about interviews that more or less restate only what's already available by spending ten minutes on the web ?

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (212.113.164.105) on

      this is an interview? oh, sorry, my fault... IMO this is ****

    2. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.0.135) on

      Yes, I agree. The question should be, why are so many people lazy and uninformed? If you proport yourself to be an interviewer you should do your research. This sort of problem isn't just limited to people reporting OpenBSD, either. How many times have you read a newspaper or seen a TV report and thought, "well, that's not exactly the whole story..."

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