Re: Envy or Store or what?

On Monday, October 28, 2002, at 12:48  PM, Cees de Groot wrote:

> Cees de Groot <cg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> > Smalltalk, and Squeak in particular, is about doing The Right Thing. 
> > CVS is,
> > IMNSHO, a crutch that is absolutely necessary at the moment to have 
> > something,
> > but definitely not The Right Thing.

I agree here, up to a point. DVS makes using CVS Squeak fairly 
painless, but it's far from ideal.

> If DVS can use multiple backends, wouldn't Subversion be a better 
> choice?

I'm a big fan of Subversion, but I think integrating it with Squeak 
nicely would quite difficult. Subversion is designed as a set of 
libraries that a Subversion client can link against. But the API they 
present uses a lot of callbacks, so calling into it via FFI would be 
tricky at best.

Another option would be to just use the svn client. This is easy, but 
not much of an improvement over using cvs. Svn is "a better CVS," so 
you still have hassle of synching code back and forth between a working 
copy and your image.

Avi mentions the possibility of implementing a WebDAV client. That 
would be a start, but you'd still have to implement an SVN client on 
top of that, since Subversion's use of WebDAV is fairly specialized. So 
this is a fair amount of work.

I think implementing our own respository similar to ENVY or StORE would 
be a pretty attractive option. It's probably not that much more work 
than implementing DAV, for example, or the CVS pserver protocol...

Cheers,

Colin

Colin Putney
Whistler.com