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Posted to users@subversion.apache.org by Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> on 2003/09/09 23:38:52 UTC
Subversion vs. Perforce
In our young startup I've installed Subversion because I could, and
we've been using it for about a month now successfully (admittedly
I've done 95% of all checkins, we've not started using Apache, and
I've failed miserably at building from source for Red Hat 9 -- a
mystery which I don't have time to research further alas). We now
have a real VP of engineering, and he wants to switch to Perforce.
This is not a fight I want to spend a lot of time on, but if there's
an obvious rebuttal to his arguments for switching I'd like to hear
it.
His reasoning is that we're going to have *one* company-wide source
control system for all documents that need to be under source control,
not just code, but also specs, docs, marketing collateral, etc. I
agree with this. Then he argues that non-engineers such as marketing
are going to use the source control software, and that they won't be
able to use Subversion since there's only a command line interface,
while Perforce has a nice GUI for such people. I agree that a GUI is
necessary.
So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the command
line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but I imagine it's a
nice piece of work, especially if you're on Windows (the only platform
we care about for non-engineers). I liked the Perforce command line
interface fine, but I'd prefer to continue to work with Subversion if
only to support open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce
will cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
per-repository revisions and its approach to branching better. But
for that money I can't put up much of a fight -- I want to save energy
for real work and for defending Python's role in the project if it
becomes under threat.
Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>.
Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> writes:
> Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
Alas, Subversion is only a 3-year old open source project, just barely
on the verge of 1.0. It's not yet as "polished" as much older
commercial systems. Perforce and Clearcase both have super-slick GUIs
that have been under development for many years. Subversion has a
bunch of GUIs that are 'evolving' along with Subversion, also as very
young open source projects.
Take a look at our 'links' page, it points to many GUI projects.
In my personal experience, TortoiseSVN is the most advanced
(i.e. "usable") at the moment. It's also the only GUI (that I'm aware
of) which is actually being widely deployed by people in "production"
environments. I use it myself at home.
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Brian Mathis <bm...@directedge.com>.
Take a look at:
http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
Both GUIs for SVN that run in Windows, each with a different take on
interface.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
[...]
> Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
--
Brian Mathis
http://www.directedge.com/
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Brian Behlendorf <br...@collab.net>.
On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
> Perforce's GUI?
Can Perforce allow you to mount a repository as a Windows web folder via
Webdav? For getting use by non-developers in the company, this seems like
a slam-dunk... no fancy GUI they have to learn at all.
Brian
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Marc Singer <el...@buici.com>.
Even if Perforce were free, I wouldn't support it.
On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 09:27:20PM -0700, Brandon Ehle wrote:
> Marc Singer wrote:
>
> >I sympathize. I'm doing something similar with one of my clients. I
> >hope they'll be OK with subversion since the only SCM they're familiar
> >with is VSS which, IMHO, is little better than a trash can.
> >
> >The reason I prefer subversion is that it
> > a) doesn't use locking
> > b) doesn't have a concept of a working directory as known by the server
> >
> >The trouble is that in a point-by-point comparison, Perforce is more
> >mature and should probably be selected. Again, IMHO, the key feature
> >that subversion lacks is drop-dead easy branch merging. It's planned
> >and it looks like the plan is an excellent one. AFAICT from reading
> >the Perforce documentation, subversion is much easier to setup, but
> >that probably isn't going to carry much weight.
> >
> >
> The fact that we are even trying to do a point-by-point comparison
> between a product that has been released for 6 years and project that is
> not even Beta yet is a testament in and of itself. :)
>
>
>
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Brandon Ehle <az...@yahoo.com>.
Marc Singer wrote:
>I sympathize. I'm doing something similar with one of my clients. I
>hope they'll be OK with subversion since the only SCM they're familiar
>with is VSS which, IMHO, is little better than a trash can.
>
>The reason I prefer subversion is that it
> a) doesn't use locking
> b) doesn't have a concept of a working directory as known by the server
>
>The trouble is that in a point-by-point comparison, Perforce is more
>mature and should probably be selected. Again, IMHO, the key feature
>that subversion lacks is drop-dead easy branch merging. It's planned
>and it looks like the plan is an excellent one. AFAICT from reading
>the Perforce documentation, subversion is much easier to setup, but
>that probably isn't going to carry much weight.
>
>
The fact that we are even trying to do a point-by-point comparison
between a product that has been released for 6 years and project that is
not even Beta yet is a testament in and of itself. :)
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Marc Singer <el...@buici.com>.
I sympathize. I'm doing something similar with one of my clients. I
hope they'll be OK with subversion since the only SCM they're familiar
with is VSS which, IMHO, is little better than a trash can.
The reason I prefer subversion is that it
a) doesn't use locking
b) doesn't have a concept of a working directory as known by the server
The trouble is that in a point-by-point comparison, Perforce is more
mature and should probably be selected. Again, IMHO, the key feature
that subversion lacks is drop-dead easy branch merging. It's planned
and it looks like the plan is an excellent one. AFAICT from reading
the Perforce documentation, subversion is much easier to setup, but
that probably isn't going to carry much weight.
Cheers.
On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 04:38:52PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> In our young startup I've installed Subversion because I could, and
> we've been using it for about a month now successfully (admittedly
> I've done 95% of all checkins, we've not started using Apache, and
> I've failed miserably at building from source for Red Hat 9 -- a
> mystery which I don't have time to research further alas). We now
> have a real VP of engineering, and he wants to switch to Perforce.
> This is not a fight I want to spend a lot of time on, but if there's
> an obvious rebuttal to his arguments for switching I'd like to hear
> it.
[deletia]
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by David Waite <ma...@akuma.org>.
Garrett Rooney wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
>> Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the command
>> line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but I imagine it's a
>> nice piece of work, especially if you're on Windows (the only platform
>> we care about for non-engineers). I liked the Perforce command line
>> interface fine, but I'd prefer to continue to work with Subversion if
>> only to support open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce
>> will cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
>> per-repository revisions and its approach to branching better. But
>> for that money I can't put up much of a fight -- I want to save energy
>> for real work and for defending Python's role in the project if it
>> becomes under threat.
>
>
> You know, of all the features of Perforce, I would not have expected
> "GUI client" to be the one that would be beating us out. Now their
> intelligent merging support, that would be a more convincing argument...
This is mostly opinion and personal experience, but...
This was actually the argument which switched us from CVS to Perforce at
my last company - that non-developers could not figure out the wincvs
GUI (I kept trying to explain to them that this was because wincvs was a
horrible, horrible gui, and using the command-line would actually be a
lot more intuitive for them ;-))
The SCC integration in most applications is just horrible, to the point
where we were not allowed to use them (too many incidents of data loss
on updates and commits). We had many problems where the lack of local
file tracking information ('CVS' or '.svn' directories) caused major
headaches, especially when people were pair-programming - they would
switch users without realizing it, hitting the same view with a
different perforce 'client' which thought there were different local
file versions. The next commit or update would cause perforce to get
confused and remove local and committed changes. Finally, the whole
system was so incredibly slow, when I was heavily using the repository I
sometimes felt over an hour of my day was just running perforce
commands. If I never see another 'running man' cursor I will die a
reasonably happy man :-)
There is also wire security to perforce whatsoever (password
authentication is clear text for most clients on both ends, traffic is
unencrypted). The problems I had with perforce were actually what
convinced me to start using and working on subversion; I wanted to make
sure I could sell an alternative to perforce in the future, and to
hopefully not have to use it again. It wound up poorly meeting the needs
of the non-engineers, and the engineers for the most part would have
been much happier and more productive even with CVS.
That said, the two largest selling points for Perforce would probably be
the increased authorization support and the file locking support.
Ultimately the decision on which tool to use came from the SCM, and they
liked being able to control the branching/tagging policy. File locking
is very important for files which do not have clear merging tools, or
when the inconvenience of being blocked by a lock outweighs the
inconvenience of possibly having to perform a merge. Both of these are
areas subversion will improve in the future.
Another possible selling point is the perforce windows GUI being able to
display and navigate the server repositories, and display some useful
user repository "View" information, such as out-of-date files and who
has the current lock on a certain file. This however was way too slow
(even in our small group) to be truely useful except to resolve locking
conflicts. As far as server-side navigation, I preferred viewcvs over p4web.
I understand the merge tracking is more sophisticated with perforce, but
AFAIK it comes with no merge tools. I had difficulty figuring out how to
actually perform the merge resolution with perforce - I prefer the
subversion model for its simplicity.
Not to mention the python support is more integrated with subversion... ;-)
If I was in this situation, I might try to get subversion evaluated,
probably under the argument that X, Y, and Z are the only features not
currently in subversion that are in perforce, especially if I could show
there is concensus that the features are valuable and will be added (at
some point). Saying that third parties are writing tools that should
allow conversion between the two systems might also make it perceived as
a lower risk. If it is close, I'd see if they were willing to try a
limited evaluation of the TortoiseSVN with the non-development users
(assuming they are also windows platform users). If worse comes to
worse, there is always the possibility of switching tools in the future
if it becomes clear that a future version of subversion meets your needs
better.
-David Waite
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
> Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the command
> line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but I imagine it's a
> nice piece of work, especially if you're on Windows (the only platform
> we care about for non-engineers). I liked the Perforce command line
> interface fine, but I'd prefer to continue to work with Subversion if
> only to support open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce
> will cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
> per-repository revisions and its approach to branching better. But
> for that money I can't put up much of a fight -- I want to save energy
> for real work and for defending Python's role in the project if it
> becomes under threat.
You know, of all the features of Perforce, I would not have expected
"GUI client" to be the one that would be beating us out. Now their
intelligent merging support, that would be a more convincing argument...
At least until we get to that problem post-1.0 ;-)
> Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
There are a number of different clients listed on
http://subversion.tigris.org/project_links.html
Personally, I suggest you take a look at RapidSVN and TortoiseSVN, as
they seem to be the most full featured gui clients, but depending on
your specific needs some of the others might also be useful.
-garrett
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Tom Lord <lo...@emf.net>.
> From: Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org>
> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
> Perforce's GUI?
Is that _really_ the deciding factor? You wrote:
> In our young startup [....]
> I've failed miserably at building from source for Red Hat 9
> [....]
(And, didn't you earlier report trying for an entire day? Presumably
that's not what you were hired to work on :-)
> [VPoE's] reasoning [for Perforce] is that we're going to have
> *one* company-wide source control system for all documents that
> need to be under source control, not just code, but also specs,
> docs, marketing collateral, etc.
Sounds like a cost control and robustness decision. He can hire
(from a large supply of unemployed, around these parts) a quite well
qualified, quite experienced sysadmin with Perforce experience.
> I liked the Perforce command line interface fine, but [....]
Stop there. Good enough.
> $750/seat that Perforce will cost
Peanuts.
You go on to say that you like some esoteric aspects of Subversion
technology and like that it's open source -- but notably, you don't
say "Subversion would let us developers do our work in such a
fundamentally better way than any alternative that I think we
developers need to fight to use it."
It seems to me that to get svn into your shop, someone who wants to
make a business of it should approach you with a convincing offer that
says:
1) for less than $750/seat + 1/20*sysadmin-with-Perforce-experience
2) I'll help install svn in your shop and set up a GUI that your
entire staff will enjoy
3) I'll guarantee uptime, reliability, and efficiency comparable to
what you'd get from Perforce (if not better)
But I think that's a damn hard price-point / feature-set to hit with
Subversion at the moment. (And, no, arch would have similar problems
hitting that price point.)
Revision control is a nasty, horrid, niche within the industry to try
to make money by conventional means, at this point in history.
-t
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by lamikr_mdk <la...@aragorn.kortex.jyu.fi>.
Btw, has anybody any experiences from the subclipse? How does it compare
against the RapidSVN or TortoiseSVN.
Mika
>> Thanks all. I think I'll try to at least demo TortoiseSVN; it looks
>> like RapidSVN has an approach that requires you to understand the
>> command line first, and I got it to crash (maybe because there's no
>> version of it matching the version of svn I've got installed on my
>> Windows box).
>>
> About the crashes: which version did you try? The latest version for
> Windows is 0.3.1. You dont have to have subversion installed on your
> computer to use RapidSVN.
>
> And about the concepts:
> In my understanding RapidSVN struggles with the following problem or
> maybe call it paradoxon:
> - being easy to understand and use for a non-technical audience
> - being feature-rich and consistent with the underlying version
> control concepts
>
> Pros for RapidSVN:
> - cross platform (Linux/Unix, Windows now and Mac OS X in the near
> future)
> - performance compared to Java/Swing application
>
> Cons for RapidSVN:
> - still doesnt support all the features svn has
> - still in heavy development
>
> Xela
>
>
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Alexander Mueller <Xe...@web.de>.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>Personally, I like TortoiseSVN:
>>
>>http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
>>
>>There's also RapidSVN:
>>
>>http://rapidsvn.tigris.org
>
>
> Thanks all. I think I'll try to at least demo TortoiseSVN; it looks
> like RapidSVN has an approach that requires you to understand the
> command line first, and I got it to crash (maybe because there's no
> version of it matching the version of svn I've got installed on my
> Windows box).
>
About the crashes: which version did you try? The latest version for
Windows is 0.3.1. You dont have to have subversion installed on your
computer to use RapidSVN.
And about the concepts:
In my understanding RapidSVN struggles with the following problem or
maybe call it paradoxon:
- being easy to understand and use for a non-technical audience
- being feature-rich and consistent with the underlying version
control concepts
Pros for RapidSVN:
- cross platform (Linux/Unix, Windows now and Mac OS X in the near
future)
- performance compared to Java/Swing application
Cons for RapidSVN:
- still doesnt support all the features svn has
- still in heavy development
Xela
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org>.
> Personally, I like TortoiseSVN:
>
> http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
>
> There's also RapidSVN:
>
> http://rapidsvn.tigris.org
Thanks all. I think I'll try to at least demo TortoiseSVN; it looks
like RapidSVN has an approach that requires you to understand the
command line first, and I got it to crash (maybe because there's no
version of it matching the version of svn I've got installed on my
Windows box).
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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RE: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by "Charles E. Doucette" <cd...@med-learn.com>.
Personally, I like TortoiseSVN:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
There's also RapidSVN:
http://rapidsvn.tigris.org
I also work at a small startup and I'm attempting to champion Subversion (so
far successfully).
My boss - essentially the VP of engineering, likes open source tools (we use
PHP and MySQL etc.).
We also don't have much money to spend.
When I first started looking for a source control tool, I tried to set up
CVS. I had problems with the configuration. When I went looking for
solutions (or alternatives), I found Subversion. The repository
features and the server setup are clearly superior to CVS. The front-ends
are quite functional but still unsophisticated.
If you try to use TortoiseSVN, it's important to at least configure an
external diff tool.
For people used to CVS and Visual Source Safe, it's a change to check out an
entire project at a time
rather than just the file/files you are working on. It's also a change not
to be able to see who has
what checked out. In our company, people are used to sharing one development
server, rather than
doing all development on their PC - still they are making the effort to try
to use source control
at all and Subversion at least for now.
Perhaps the question to ask your boss is what exactly does he believe he is
getting from Perforce
for all the extra money he'd have to spend?
Chuck
> -----Original Message-----
> From: guido@12-236-84-31.client.attbi.com
> [mailto:guido@12-236-84-31.client.attbi.com] On Behalf Of
> Guido van Rossum
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 7:39 PM
> To: users@subversion.tigris.org
> Subject: Subversion vs. Perforce
>
>
> In our young startup I've installed Subversion because I
> could, and we've been using it for about a month now
> successfully (admittedly I've done 95% of all checkins, we've
> not started using Apache, and I've failed miserably at
> building from source for Red Hat 9 -- a mystery which I don't
> have time to research further alas). We now have a real VP
> of engineering, and he wants to switch to Perforce. This is
> not a fight I want to spend a lot of time on, but if there's
> an obvious rebuttal to his arguments for switching I'd like
> to hear it.
>
> His reasoning is that we're going to have *one* company-wide
> source control system for all documents that need to be under
> source control, not just code, but also specs, docs,
> marketing collateral, etc. I agree with this. Then he
> argues that non-engineers such as marketing are going to use
> the source control software, and that they won't be able to
> use Subversion since there's only a command line interface,
> while Perforce has a nice GUI for such people. I agree that
> a GUI is necessary.
>
> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
> Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the
> command line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but
> I imagine it's a nice piece of work, especially if you're on
> Windows (the only platform we care about for non-engineers).
> I liked the Perforce command line interface fine, but I'd
> prefer to continue to work with Subversion if only to support
> open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce will
> cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
> per-repository revisions and its approach to branching
> better. But for that money I can't put up much of a fight --
> I want to save energy for real work and for defending
> Python's role in the project if it becomes under threat.
>
> Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Barry Scott <no...@barrys-emacs.org>.
Opss didn't finish
We have a SCM built in Python on top of SourceSafe that allows us to do
complete
engineering life cycle. We manage source in logical subsystems, build it on
multiple
platforms and have GUI tools to speed up common development processes.
To move to svn we have to port the python SCM to it.
BArry
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Barry Scott <ba...@barrys-emacs.org>.
>I think betting the business on VSS is a way worse proposition!
>Having just had a major SourceSafe data hiccup^H^H^H^H^H^H
>corruption, we now have the mandate to move us off of SourceSafe
>by end-of-year (for source code at least).
No argument from me. SourceSafe is a big maintenance problem.
There are ways to keep VSS working, use atleast 6.0c, analyze frequently,
keep each DB's size down <2GB, avoid the commands that are documented
to corrupt the DB's.
I'm with you, I cannot recommend SourceSafe.
But we have 64 active DB's and tools built on top. Getting off is not going
to be easy for us.
> > 3. Can you build tools on top of its API's? Answer today: No. We need docs
> > of the python API to SVN and we need examples.
>
>Agreed in an ideal world, but as of Friday, I didn't know ANY
>Python and hadn't run anything beyond the most trivial example
>usages of svn. It's not that hard to figure out from the examples
>which are there, even though there could be more.
>
> > We have a SCM built in Python on top of SourceSafe that allows to do
> > complete engineering
>
>Admittedly I don't know the extent of your scripting of VSS now,
>but if you managed to figure that all out from the VSS documentation
>and quirky command line, you can do the same with svn.
The VSS API has reasonable docs in MSDN and almost always does
what they say. The API size is a lot smaller then SVN's that make getting
going easy. I fear that I'm going to have to invest a large amount of time to
get my head around the SVN API.
I'm off now to find the C API docs that Ben refers to and see if that helps.
>--Jim
Barry
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Jim Sokoloff <ji...@sokoloff.com>.
On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Barry Scott wrote:
> The questions that I and my coworkers ask is this:
> 1. Is Subversion features better then we have with SourceSafe? Answer
> today? Yes, YES!
> 2. Would you bet the business on Subversion? Answer today: No, not stable
> enough.
I think betting the business on VSS is a way worse proposition!
Having just had a major SourceSafe data hiccup^H^H^H^H^H^H
corruption, we now have the mandate to move us off of SourceSafe
by end-of-year (for source code at least).
> 3. Can you build tools on top of its API's? Answer today: No. We need docs
> of the python API to SVN and we need examples.
Agreed in an ideal world, but as of Friday, I didn't know ANY
Python and hadn't run anything beyond the most trivial example
usages of svn. It's not that hard to figure out from the examples
which are there, even though there could be more.
> We have a SCM built in Python on top of SourceSafe that allows to do
> complete engineering
Admittedly I don't know the extent of your scripting of VSS now,
but if you managed to figure that all out from the VSS documentation
and quirky command line, you can do the same with svn.
--Jim
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>.
Jens-Uwe Mager <ju...@anubis.han.de> writes:
>
> http://codespeak.net/svn/vpath/trunk/dist/vpath/subversion.py
>
> This is in line 331 you see that real code to open a file stream to
> rerieve the contents of a versioned resource is commented out and hacked
> around with opening a pipe to svn cat. I would be really interesting in
> implementing that without the pipe by using the avn api directly. Do you
> have any clues how to make that work?
Hmmm. When I load the 'core' svn functions into python, I can see
that svn_stream_create() definitely exists, as well as all the other
svn_stream() functions. I imagine all you need to do is supply a
write function, and attach it to the stream via
svn_stream_set_write(). Then svn_client_cat() will push data at your
stream. Your write function can be very simple -- it can buffer the
whole file in memory if it wants to.
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Jens-Uwe Mager <ju...@anubis.han.de>.
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 15:14 -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> Barry Scott <no...@barrys-emacs.org> writes:
>
> > 3. Can you build tools on top of its API's? Answer today: No. We
> > need docs of the python API to SVN and we need examples.
>
> The python API is the same as the C API. And the C API is fully
> documented in all the public header files. And there are all sorts of
> example programs in the source tree, both in C and python. And
> there's even a whole chapter in the book about using the C API, and a
> couple O'Reilly articles about that on our 'links' webpage too. I'm
> not sure what more you might want.
I have had several problems in understanding the python API in the past,
nothing that could have found in the C api docs as it pertains to how
things translate from C to python. For example in the open method in:
http://codespeak.net/svn/vpath/trunk/dist/vpath/subversion.py
This is in line 331 you see that real code to open a file stream to
rerieve the contents of a versioned resource is commented out and hacked
around with opening a pipe to svn cat. I would be really interesting in
implementing that without the pipe by using the avn api directly. Do you
have any clues how to make that work?
BTW:
The vpath module abstracts operations on path names for local filesystem
and subversion URLs. It has two subversion implementations, one using
pipes to the svn command line and one using the subversion python API.
The one through the API is not complete as I was unable to implement
opening streams properly as well as finding examples for getting a log
editor to work.
--
Jens-Uwe Mager <pgp-mailto:F476EBC2>
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>.
Barry Scott <no...@barrys-emacs.org> writes:
> 3. Can you build tools on top of its API's? Answer today: No. We
> need docs of the python API to SVN and we need examples.
The python API is the same as the C API. And the C API is fully
documented in all the public header files. And there are all sorts of
example programs in the source tree, both in C and python. And
there's even a whole chapter in the book about using the C API, and a
couple O'Reilly articles about that on our 'links' webpage too. I'm
not sure what more you might want.
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Re: Subversion vs. Perforce
Posted by Barry Scott <no...@barrys-emacs.org>.
The questions that I and my coworkers ask is this:
1. Is Subversion features better then we have with SourceSafe? Answer
today? Yes, YES!
2. Would you bet the business on Subversion? Answer today: No, not stable
enough.
3. Can you build tools on top of its API's? Answer today: No. We need docs
of the python
API to SVN and we need examples.
We have a SCM built in Python on top of SourceSafe that allows to do complete
engineering
Barry
At 09-09-2003 16:38, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>In our young startup I've installed Subversion because I could, and
>we've been using it for about a month now successfully (admittedly
>I've done 95% of all checkins, we've not started using Apache, and
>I've failed miserably at building from source for Red Hat 9 -- a
>mystery which I don't have time to research further alas). We now
>have a real VP of engineering, and he wants to switch to Perforce.
>This is not a fight I want to spend a lot of time on, but if there's
>an obvious rebuttal to his arguments for switching I'd like to hear
>it.
>
>His reasoning is that we're going to have *one* company-wide source
>control system for all documents that need to be under source control,
>not just code, but also specs, docs, marketing collateral, etc. I
>agree with this. Then he argues that non-engineers such as marketing
>are going to use the source control software, and that they won't be
>able to use Subversion since there's only a command line interface,
>while Perforce has a nice GUI for such people. I agree that a GUI is
>necessary.
>
>So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
>Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the command
>line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but I imagine it's a
>nice piece of work, especially if you're on Windows (the only platform
>we care about for non-engineers). I liked the Perforce command line
>interface fine, but I'd prefer to continue to work with Subversion if
>only to support open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce
>will cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
>per-repository revisions and its approach to branching better. But
>for that money I can't put up much of a fight -- I want to save energy
>for real work and for defending Python's role in the project if it
>becomes under threat.
>
>Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
>
>--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
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