[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] FFmpeg "developers conference"

[Diego Biurrun]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 10:01:34AM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> 
> On 6/19/07, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 08:31:00AM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> 
> > > --
> > > Subversion has been the most pointless project ever started
> > >   -- Linus Torvalds
> >
> > That is the stupidest quote I've seen in signatures for a long time.
> 
> I never said that all quotes I put on my signature were things I agree
> with. I don't see why only smart quotes (which make people look smart)
> should be preferred against dumb quotes (who make people look dumb).

:)

> What I think about subversion is that from a user point of view, SVN
> is a step on the right direction because it fixes the important
> problems with CVS. However, from an admin point of view, SVN is really
> poorly designed: each time a branch is created, the _whole_ repository
> is duplicated, which makes branches un-usable when you have a finite
> amount of data you are able to backup.
> 
> CVS, with its file-based history, doesn't suffer from this explosion
> of the repository's size when you create a branch.
> 
> To put it in a nutshell, if you neglect the backup constrains and
> don't do branches (like MPlayer and FFmpeg do), SVN works quite well.

None of the above is true.  Copies (branches) are cheap in Subversion,
you can think of them as hard links with copy on write.

I believe I can credibly claim to have some admin experience with both
CVS and Subversion.  Subversion is CVS 2.0 from an admin point of view
as well.  The hook infrastructure for doing things before and after
commits etc is well designed and easy to work with, especially compared
to CVS.

> > (I don't know the context so this is not a statement about Linus.)
> 
> To get the full context, watch the video here:
> http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2007/05/linus-torvalds-on-git-and-scm.html

I'll watch it when I find the time.

Diego