CVS or Subversion? (Also, hosting sites and licenses)

[jducoeur]

So I'm prepping to get the Querki project up and running -- the next couple of weeks are going to be heavily focused on laying the groundwork. I'd promised myself that I would get the project started this summer, and I'm running out of that, so it's time to deal. Which means that I need to make a lot of decisions that I've been putting off. One of these is: what do I use to do the versioning, publishing and management of this project?

The first part of this is which package I use to manage the files. There are really only two contenders here, CVS and Subversion: I'm not going to use a commercial option to manage an open-source project, and those are the two "brand name" open-source choices. I know CVS moderately well, and am familiar with its quirks and failings -- in particular, the fact that it doesn't do atomic checkins, which has annoyed me for many years. I don't know Subversion nearly as well, but it generally seems to be the choice for newer projects, so it's probably the default choice. Do folks here have experience and opinions? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have experience with both, about whether they see any gotchas in Subversion that might be an issue for me.

The second part is where to host the project. For something like this, using an open project host seems like a good idea -- it means I don't have to wrestle with the management, backups, and so on. SourceForge is the obvious choice, but I know there are others. Anyone have any reason to believe one of the alternatives would be superior?

Any input here would be greatly welcomed, so long as it's soon. Sometime soon (possibly as soon as late this afternoon) I'm likely to sign the project up on SourceForge under Subversion, unless I find reason to do otherwise.

Also of interest is the question of which open source license to use. If anyone has passionate opinions, I'd be interested to hear them, but I have pretty strong views on this topic myself.

Oh, and I also had better park the domain for the project -- someone's already squatted the .com version, so I think I need to claim the .org, even though it'll be some months before I'm ready to use it. Any opinions about good web hosts for parking? It's fairly likely that I'll eventually host the site out of my living room (if Comcast is allowing HTTP traffic out of my node, which I'm not sure about), so I'm mainly interested in an easy-to-deal-with site that I can put a parking page up on, and later swap away from. (Edit: actually, looking into this a little more, I suspect that simply putting the parking page on SourceForge itself may be the easiest option...)

Comments

[mneme]

Subversion does have some irritations (branching being optimized for trees, not files is a biggie, though cheap copies make this less problematic than it might be).

I'm tolk that SVK (as a frontend to svn) papers over a lot of the interface issues with Subversion, so you might want to try using Subversion and using SVK as the primary client.

Branching trees

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Subversion does have some irritations (branching being optimized for trees, not files is a biggie

Yeah, but that turns out to be a win when some branches have a particular file and others don't—CVS doesn't deal cleanly with that case.

Re: Branching trees

[mneme]

Oh, sure -- there are -many- ways the subversion "branch by copy" approach is strong. But the proliferation of empty branches the Subversion approach encourages can be cumbersome (because among other things, as little space as they take in the repository, they mean you can't simply check out the branches tree, but have to know which branch you need) -- though I think some of the better front-end tools can help deal with that.

Re: Branching trees

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I'll take your word for it—I haven't run into that problem myself. I will, however, point out that CVS also requires you to know which branch you need; there's no such thing as the branches tree.

Re: Branching trees

[mneme]

Well, sort of. In CVS, you can look at the file you want to get a branch on and see what branches have been made on it. In Subversion, you have to know which branch you need (unless you really want to check out -all- branches...which isn't a good idea on a decent-sized project) from among the branches that have been made on the project, rather than those made on the file.

Of course, some of this is cultural -- there's nothing stopping someone from coming up with a structure for single-file branches in subversion. And in general, Subversion's still superior. But the fact that branches are really second-class operations in Subversion (deriving from the way copying and merging works, rather than having its own defined existence) does have some consequences.

[jducoeur]

Okay, cool -- I'll take a look at SVK. Thanks!