Re: [Arx-users] Why not ArX?

[Walter Landry]

Kevin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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

I looked at it briefly.  It is more mature and has a slick gui, but it
doesn't handle renames.  Adding that feature will not be easy.

> >>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/

I had forgotten that he also manages that dmoz entry.  Perhaps that is
why I have not heard anything ;)

> >>  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?

No.

>  >>  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.

Ok.  The last time I heard from him was Nov 21.

> >>  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.

Good.

> >>  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.

That would be fine.

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

Yes.  I added it ;) (along with a bunch of others).

<snip>
> >>- 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.

The next release will include cryptograhic signatures, so I think that
will be good to publicize.

> >>- 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.

If you write an ebuild, I can include it.  There is an old rpm.spec
file included in the distribution which could use some love.  I have
started a debian build directory, but stopped when I discovered the
licensing problems.  I run debian, so that is the easiest one for me
to test.

> >>- 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.

Ok.

> >>- 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.

Great.  I can give you access to the savannah home page once you have
something.  Then you can update it directly.

> >>- 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.

Ok.  I will send a followup later with my list of TODO items.

> > 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.

Making things easier was one of the bigger drivers in how ArX evolved.
I don't think it is quite as easy as darcs yet for small projects,
partly because you still have to think about archives.  I have thought
a little about making a darcs-like workflow, where the archive is
created within the directory.  That is more long-term.

> Other long-term tasks important for wide adoption will be a GUI,

I found the ArchWay gui to be passable.  It might be possible to adapt
that to ArX.  That would be for a Perl programmer.

> and an eclipse plug-in. Hopefully new folks attracted to ArX will be
> eager to take those on.

Walter