[Arx-users] Hosting with CVS and SVN

[Walter Landry]

Greetings,

I have been thinking a bit about how to take advantage of all of these
free hosting sites that only offer CVS and/or Subversion.  I then
realized that ArX should be able to use those repositories directly.
Essentially, CVS/SVN would be back ends for ArX.

This is possible because CVS/SVN both present a virtual filesystem,
and ArX makes very mild use of the filesystem.  Specifically, ArX only
really needs "get", "put", and "ls" [1].  These map to the CVS/SVN
commands "export", "import", and "ls".  For ArX 3, the filenames are
guaranteed to be simple ascii, so parsing the output of these programs
should be trivial.

The upshot of all of this is that ArX 3 repos [2] could be hosted at even
more places, including places that do not want to think about
distributed version control.

The only caveat is that, if you want to use CVS, then "ls" must be
enabled on the server.  I do not know of any places where this is
actually a problem (Sourceforge's CVS does not allow "ls", but they
do offer SVN).

Note that other projects that target dumb servers can not do this as
easily because they rely on "append" functionality.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
address@hidden

[1] ArX also uses "rename" to ensure atomic operations.  However, if
the backend can ensure that creating multiple files is atomic, then
ArX does not need "rename".  SVN gives that guarantee, while CVS does
not.  So CVS would be less reliable.

[2] This scheme would mostly work for ArX 2 repos as well, but I would
rather invest the time in getting ArX 3 out.