Re: [Arx-users] Why not ArX?

[Kevin Smith]

Walter Landry wrote:
> archipel is one that I had not heard of.  It looks even more rough
> than codeville.

Yup. More of a concept than a product, last time I checked.

Hm. Just stumbled upon 'superversion', a supposedly mature, distributed 
RCS written in Java. Not much detailed material on their web site:
  http://www.superversion.org/index.html

> > My first thought was that people might be ignoring ArX because they 
> > believe it is merely a pale fork of arch (which it clearly is not).
>
> I think this may be the critical point.

At one level of indirection, I agree. I think the masses are simply not 
aware of ArX at all, but that is largely because several influential 
figures in the SCM arena still think ArX is "just" a fork of tla.

> I actually did a lot of this about a week or so ago.  I am more than
> happy if you want to pursue this.  What I did for the links you
> mentioned

Great minds think alike :-)

> >  http://better-scm.berlios.de/
>
> I contacted the author of this page.  He was under the impression that
> ArX is just an implementation of Arch.  I sent a followup, but I have
> not heard back from him.

Good. Although he (Shlomi Fish) is solidly in the Subversion camp at the 
moment, it is important that he understand what ArX is. Partly because 
(as you point out) he writes articles like this:

>>  http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/01/29/scm_overview.html

but also because he is the editor for this page:

>>  http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Configuration_Management/Tools/



> >  http://www.venge.net/monotone/others.html
>
> Graydon Hoare certainly knows that ArX exists.  We had a short
> discussion when I thanked him for his xdelta implementation.

Graydon seems like a truly nice guy. I know he is very busy, so the 
trick won't be convincing him that ArX should be on the list, but rather 
in helping him remember to add ArX next time he is updating the site. 
Did your discussion specifically cover adding ArX to the list?

>>  http://zooko.com/revision_control_quick_ref.html
>
> I sent Zooko an email, and he promised to look into ArX when he
> has time.

I know Zooko is active in the darcs community. Hopefully he can add ArX 
to the list without waiting to do a "full review" of it. Maybe I should 
ping him as a follow-up.

> >  http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/versioncontrol.shtml
> >  http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/links/scm-links.html#Free_CM_Tools
>
> I have not contacted these people.  It has an odd collection of links.
> I have not contacted this site either.  It also has an odd collection
> of links.

Ok. I would be happy to contact them if you would like.

> >  http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/scm.html
>
> As you noted, this one lists ArX.  It would be nice to have it in its
> own section, especially since the other implementations listed in the
> same sentece as ArX are all deceased.

If you haven't already contacted them, I can.

Side note: I just noticed ArX is linked from the wikipedia article on 
version control. Yea!

> >  http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/scm.html
>
> I have been thinking about sending him an email.  It requires more
> thought, since I would like to discuss what is good or bad about ArX,
> rather than just "have you heard of ArX?".

True. The comparison you mention below would definitely be a helpful 
tool. I can help with the darcs part, and somewhat with monotone.

> > And there are some relevant blogs:
> >  http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/
> >  http://del.icio.us/tv/version-control
>
> There is also Colin Walter's site, web.verbum.org.  In any case, blogs
> also require more thought.

As long as the bloggers are aware of ArX (and what it really is), it's 
up to them whether or not to blog about it. I think they are key to the 
long-term broad awareness of ArX, but perhaps not a first priority.

> > - Submit release news items to lwn.net
>
> I have a freshmeat entry that shows up indirectly on lwn.net.  I have
> no idea what lwn's criteria is for an announcement in the main
> section.  If you had the time, maybe it would be good to find out.

I believe they will run any relevant news item. Next time you do a 
release you want to publicize, you (or I) can send a couple sentence 
description to them. Let me know if you want help.

> > - Create .rpm .deb and gentoo ebuilds
>
> Making binaries is hampered by some licensing problems with Boost.
> The Boost Graph Library (BGL) is under a GPL-incompatible license.
> The BGL authors are working on fixing this.  I pinged them about a
> week ago, and they were waiting to hear back from the lawyers.  Until
> then, distributing binaries is a little dodgy.

Urg. Ok. Hopefully that will be cleaned up soon. We can do a gentoo 
ebuild any time, since it builds from source. I run gentoo, and have 
wanted to learn how to create an ebuild script, so I can take this on.

> > - Write articles for lwn, newsforge, etc
>
> I am vaguely working on a comparison between ArX and the other
> distributed SCM's (monotone, tla, darcs, codeville, svk).  The notes
> are still rather jumbled.

An ArX wiki would be a great place to collaboratively build this tool. I 
don't have control over a wiki, so I'm not sure where we could do that. 
I may start my own comparison page at qualitycode.com.

> > - Make the ArX home page prettier
>
> I would like this to happen, but I am not an artist.  It would also
> make it easier for all of the other things to happen.  If you could
> help with this, that would be fabulous.

My style is simple and functional, but hopefully pleasing to the eye. An 
example is my qualitycode.com site. I could probably put together a 
simple ArX site along those lines. Later, someone more artistic could 
turn it into something prettier.

> > - Port ArX to MS Windows (and Mac OS X)
>
> This is on my TODO list after cryptographic signatures.  

I was thinking I might want to start poking around in the code. Let me 
know if there is anything specific you would like help with, or to 
delegate. No promises at this point, though, due to time constraints.

> I have to get
> my Windows partition working.  Marc Recht has been helping with OS X
> using pkgsrc.  I have done a little work on OS X with fink.  It almost
> works, and I haven't had time to figure out the (probably minor)
> errors.

Cool.

> One last marketing thing that I would like to do is to have an ArX
> version of the linux tree.  It would be a good stress test.  

Totally uninteresting to me, but I agree that it is a necessary 
marketing piece. My focus is always on small projects, and on simplicity.

I think one of the biggest strengths of ArX is that it is actually 
usable on small projects, by people who are very comfortable with CVS. 
That is definitely not true with tla, and is even a bit of a stretch 
with monotone. I think ArX is approaching the ease of darcs (basic tasks 
are easy to do), which is great.

Other long-term tasks important for wide adoption will be a GUI, and an 
eclipse plug-in. Hopefully new folks attracted to ArX will be eager to 
take those on.

Kevin