Re: [9fans] Plan9 Sources Repository

[Riddler <riddler876@gmail.com>]

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You are not the first one to bring this up. There is a chain titled
"CMS/MMS (VCS/SCM/DSCM) [was syscall 53]" that discusses it. I'd suggest
giving it a skim if you can find it in the archives.

That said, in my opinion:

> 1. The history is confined to Plan9.
>     It is hard to do small fixes (typos, documentation) from another
system.

I agree.

> 2. There are no commit comments.
>     There is no "blame" command.
>     There are no release tags (allowing for unstable work in between).
>     There are no branches (allowing for collective work on an unstable
version). OK, my machine is my branch...

I recall reading in one of the wiki pages that there is a procedure to get
a historical list of patches applied to the main sources and a message to
go with it (might have been just a readme file). I took a quick look and
can't find it again, perhaps someone else knows?

> 3. Contrib packages are tied to people; there is no common repository.
>     This leads to the situation where you can't update a package of a
long gone user.
>     Please tell me how many Mercurial packages you can find in Contrib!

I don't see how a repository would fix this. When the user is gone you
would still lose the only person with write access to the repo. You would
need to fork it. The only difference is now people just copy it.

What's really missing is an index of what current versions live where. Or
at least if it exists I am not aware of it.

> I maintain my impression that the Status Quo, though good for a small
team, does not allow the project to grow.
> Were there any efforts to change this?
> Or is it a controversial matter and it stays as it is?
> Or is the team indeed so small (or even loosing members), s.t. that a
change won't make sense?

In the short time I've been here I think its came up twice. So it is
something at least some people are interested in looking at. I'm sure it
will keep coming up.

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