Re: [gentoo-dev] overlay support current proposal?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

On Friday 24 March 2006 21:44, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> The offered software will be trac, svn, and moinmoin.  I'm going to
> look at darcs, and with the help of the haskell team and infra
> determine if we can support it or not.  No-one has expressed a
> preference for a different distributed VCS instead of darcs.
I haven't being following discussion, to be honest, as I don't really have 
time to read mailing lists lately, but I'm happy I've spotted this mail at 
least...

Although I don't know darcs at all in terms of use and feature, I would really 
suggest to _not_ use it. For a simple reason, actually: cvs has almost no 
cost added, as it's present on every major distribution, system and operating 
system, being well known and written in plain C with just a few dependencies; 
svn has a bit more costs, as it requires apr, berkdb and neon, but it's also 
available on a wide range of different system because it's also in C mainly.
Darcs, instead, is written in Haskell, which means you need architectures that 
supports Haskell, and in which it's stable enough to work... considering we 
have Gentoo/Alt, it's not that good to "cut" us off (yes I know I should be 
able to make Gentoo/FreeBSD and maybe other arches to have ghc, but that's 
not easy and not on my top priority list, while support for overlays can be 
useful.. for a while we needed java overlay to get kaffe, for example).

Also, the way ghc is bootstrapped (need a -bin and then build from sources) 
makes it not exactly painless to handle... and it's an extra language needed 
anyway.

I would be more in favour of GNU arch derived like bzr (bazaar-ng) or 
mercurial, that are written in Python. While we should know that 
saying "being interpreted means it runs anyway" doesn't fly, a working python 
is already a strict requirement (portage, anyone?) and it's way less pain 
that ghc, IMHO.

I'm also sure bzr works fine on FreeBSD, DragonFly and OSX as I've tried it 
myself..

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE