Any content to this interview? [LWN.net]

Any content to this interview?

Posted Sep 26, 2004 13:42 UTC (Sun) by sphealey (guest, #1028)
Parent article: An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

Am I the only person who found this interview totally content-free? "Other version control systems suck and arch is better. Why? Because I saw that the other systems sucked and designed arch to be better, which it is".

That's all I got out of it. Did I miss anything?

sPh

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Any content to this interview?

Posted Sep 26, 2004 14:30 UTC (Sun) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

I agree Tom could have been more explicit in explaining how arch solves the numerous flaws he points out in competing systems. That would have been more polite and more informative.

Any content to this interview?

Posted Sep 26, 2004 18:56 UTC (Sun) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Well, the article did contain very valid points, but the altitude of Tom's answers hide that information pretty effectively.

One of the points he tried to make is that a version control system should be distributed and should support merge operations between branches easily. CVS does not have these properties and Subversion while addressing other CVS shortcomings does not resolve these points either while making the system administration more complex compared with CVS.

Any content to this interview?

Posted Sep 27, 2004 20:21 UTC (Mon) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]

Tom Lord has been fairly abrasive in his criticism of subversion in the past, although he's improved somewhat in the past year. While he knows why he dislikes the design decisions of subversion, he often has difficulty articulating his thoughts in a coherent and amicable way.

The up-and-coming version (already available in beta form) of Subversion resolves some of the current administration problems of the BDB back end with a new file storage system called FSFS, written largely by Greg Hudson, I believe.

If you want distributed Subversion, try using the SVK project, which is built on top of subversion. http://svk.elixus.org/

As for me, I look forward to the time when tla works well on Windows and has some of its current warts cleaned up. In the meantime, I'll keep recommending Subversion.