svn or arch

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 10:13 -0800, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Is there any discussions about using Subversion or GNU
> arch/Bazaar (http://bazaar.canonical.com/) instead of
> cvs for the repositories.

My opinion is that in order to really enjoy the benefits of a modern RCS
(in particular history-sensitive merging), we would need to change a
number of things in the way building an RPM package works.

First, I think it's wacky to maintain patch files in revision control.
If you want to look back at history, you're looking at a diff of a diff,
which is just incomprehensible.  The right way to do this in my opinion
is to have each patch be a direct branch of the upstream source.  If you
have patch interdependencies, then you create a new branch which merges
from the interdependent branches, just like how you have to adjust the
patch files now.

Second, get rid of the RPM changelog embedded in the spec file;
conceptually the goo to build a package is independent of the history of
that goo.  Just extract the history from the RCS, or have a separate
file, or something.

Third, get rid of the idea of manually bumping revision numbers and
hardcoding these in the spec file.  These should be automatically
generated from the upstream source version and a package build database
when I want to build a package.

There's lots more we could do too, but that's a start.