[boost] Re: [1.32 Plan] Stalled forever?

From: Johan Nilsson (johan.nilsson_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-25 03:14:33

"Gennadiy Rozental" <gennadiy.rozental_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:cgh8lj$jgm$1_at_sea.gmane.org...
> I would like to second that.
>
> Two month ago  I was told that I had to freeze any development yet another
> month ago. Now we still nowhere and I still couldn't move a finger. I
> understand that it may be caused by book preparation. But should we
> necessarily need to use namely this release?

Sorry for breaking into this thread as I'm not a boost developer, but IMHO
something seems really wrong with the SCM if you need to wait two months
doing nothing. Why not branch for release right now, let people fix the
issues on the release branch and merge back to the main trunk when it's
complete (IIUC you use the main trunk as the active development line). This
would let people who are working on new or updated functionality to proceed
on the main trunk.

I assume that the projects that are being prepared for the 1.32 release will
not simultaneously be worked on in the main trunk - which could cause some
pain when merging back. Even if so, a decent SCM tool would probably make
things easy enough.

Has anyone considered using Perforce instead of CVS? I believe there's a
possibility to get a free server license for open source software
(http://www.perforce.com/perforce/opensource-faq.html) development - don't
know if the terms apply to boost. I've found Perforce easy to use and
administer, fast, exists for about as many platforms as cvs (perhaps more on
the server side) and the branching stuff is really, really smooth. Support
is also outstanding, but I don't know the support terms for open source
servers. IIRC FreeBSD (or some other BSD variety) uses Perforce as their
main development platform and basically publishes the results to CVS to make
things easier for CVS users.

I know there's also subversion, but that's pretty immature yet (no flame
wars please), and still haven't implemented atomic changelists(?). For the
sake of order, I'll admit I have no personal experience using svn.

(And, no, I'm not a Perforce sales representative - I just happen to like
the darn thing ;-)

// Johan