Re: Will Martin contribute to XEmacs in the future?

Chris> OpenCM and Subversion were touted by their developers as Chris> close replacements for CVS ("only better") and also not Chris> quite ready yet. I don't know about OpenCM, but subversion is unlikely to be better than CVS on branching. Anything that tries to emulate CVS's file orientation will be able to improve in areas that we historically have not had too much trouble with (versioning directories and object renames), but will not help much with branches (you really need distributed repositories and history-sensitive merging to get large benefits here). Jury is still out on whether subversion will be able to handle history dependence or changesets well (and in any case those are "post-1.0" features, so who knows when they will be available). Chris> BitKeeper is supposedly mature, good, huggable, and also Chris> not much like CVS. Well, I've heard from several people that it put an end to the claim that "Linus doesn't scale"; apparently Linus + bitkeeper is scaling nicely. ;-) Chris> And there is the non-free-ness, and all the flaming and Chris> screaming that entails. Flaming about non-free-ness as such is not a problem as far as I'm concerned as long as the vendor is trustworthy. Larry McVoy has proved that point to my satisfaction (my personal opinion only). However, the source is also closed, and the "no competition" clause in the BitKeeper license would force a nasty choice on at least one board member, who is a sometime prcs developer. Someday arch (http://arch.fifthvision.net/) may be a viable alternative to bitkeeper. Design is nice, documentation is good (considering the early stage of the code itself). -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.