Re: [tlug] SVN: Your Environment, BerkleyDB/Web or FSFS?

[Ian Wells <ijw@example.com>]

On 11/30/05, Edward Middleton <edward@example.com> wrote:

Ian Wells wrote:

> I'm not really arguing.  What I find a mystery is why, having adapted
> DAV to serve the purpose, there's a completely different svn protocol
> around.  Its only advantage is the standalone server - I would have
> throught that implementing the DAV protocol with a standalone server
> would have been a better idea from a maintainability front.  I
> appreciate there are other problems with this approach, but still...

I think that 90% of the protocol was allready implemented in apache
mod_dav so all they needed to write was a mod_dav file store and work
out the mapping.  The reasion for the svn protocol is that lots of cvs
users main complaint against using svn was that they had to install apache.

So my argument would be: why not find a way of serving DAV standalone rather than writing a whole new protocol and adapters for both ends?  With cheats, if necessary - it can still be a non-DAV protocol, but the aim is to share the code.

Not saying it's feasible.  It just looks like a better solution to me long term, because you have one protocol and everybody's finding the bugs in it for you, rather than two protocols and twice the bugs, and an audience split between them so that each is being tested only half as much. (*)

(* For the pedants: agreed, arguably "use" isn't "testing".  In which case divide the testers between the code rather than the users. 

What, you mean your OSS project has no testers?)