Re: Fwd: Subversion packages

[Kevin Connor Arpe <kevinarpe at gmail dot com>]

David,

Thanks for your response.  I have one more important point to add.  I
feel most hard-core UNIX hackers will laugh when I explain.  I use
IntelliJ at work which is a Java IDE.  It depends upon SVNKit for its
Subversion functionality.  SVNKit is a Pure Java implementation of the
SVN protocol.  Unfortunately, SVNKit usually lags SVN releases by 2-3
months, plus IDEs are even slower to upgrade.  Prior, I was an Eclipse
user.  The SVN/Eclpise community is full of complaints about SVNKit.
Easy to integrate with Pure Java code, but nearly always behind
compared to native libraries.  "Blah, blah, blah", I say.  So what?
At my office, due to license costs/issues, I am limited to using a
version that only supported SVN 1.6.x series.  This forces me to limit
all of my SVN tools to 1.6.x.  Blarg, truly.

When I searched in Google for this issue, I was surprised to see a
number of other people with the same issue.  No on had a simple
solution, but many were wishing for more precise version control in
Subversion-space.

Yes, I an interested to take ownership of the official Subversion
packages for Cygwin.

I was thinking about this type of SVN package setup:
* 1.6.x (svn_1.6)
* 1.7.x (svn_1.7)
* 1.8.x (svn_1.8)
* svn (latest -- currently svn_1.8)

I could create statically linked binaries that can live side-by-side,
e.g., /usr/bin/svn1.6, svn1.7, svn1.8 and plain old "svn" which is the
latest.

Please share your thoughts.

Thanks,
Arpe

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 2:17 AM, David Rothenberger <daveroth@acm.org> wrote:
> On 11/17/2013 2:30 AM, Kevin Connor Arpe wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Cygwin currently offerers two Subversion packages.  One from 1.7.x
>> series and another from 1.8.x series.
>>
>> Subversion version series are important because local repositories
>> created by each series (1.6.x, 1.7.x, 1.8.x) are incompatible.  In
>> short, if you do "svn checkout" with svn 1.6.x, you cannot do "svn
>> update" with svn 1.7.x or 1.8.x.  For a variety of reasons, at my
>> office, I am forced to use svn 1.6.x series.  This precludes me from
>> using standard pre-built Cygwin packages for Subversion work.  I'm
>> always jumping back to a IDE or DOS box to manage my svn local repos.
>>
>> I'm not here to complain about this "feature" of Subversion.  AFAIK:
>> Cygwin seems to normally provide at least two versions of any package.
>>  That's great, and usually helps.  However, this situation is a bit
>> rare.  I would like to help make each series available in Cygwin.
>> I've done some googling on this matter and noticed a few others asking
>> on mailing lists (not Cygwin, I think) about how to get svn 1.6.x on
>> the latest Cygwin.  Frankly, there were no satisfying answers.
>>
>> As a starter, I am happy to volunteer to create a specific Cygwin
>> package for Subversion 1.6.x.  Additionally, I already built my own
>> copy of Subversion 1.6.x using Cygwin build toolchain.
>
> The problem is that the Cygwin installer does not provide a mechanism
> for having more than two versions of the same package. I currently
> provide (a somewhat out-of-date) 1.7 version as "prev" and the latest
> 1.8 as "curr". I can see no way to also provide 1.6.
>
> We could make another package (subversion_1_6 or something), but users
> could not have both that and the "subversion" package installed at the
> same time. I really don't think that's a great packaging decision.
>
> Upstream makes no provisions for having multiple installed versions
> coexist. Packaging subversion for Cygwin already involves quite a few
> local patches; I'm not interested in developing and maintaining patches
> to allow multiple versions to coexist.
>
> The newer versions are able to communicate with older servers. Why can't
> you just upgrade to 1.7 or 1.8 for the client? If there is some real
> reason you cannot, I suspect your effort would be better spent trying to
> change that reason instead of packaging 1.6. Especially since even
> upstream no longer supports 1.6. However, if you really want to make
> this work and are willing to take over packaging of all versions of
> subversion and its dependencies, I'm happy to relinquish the
> maintainership to you. I've almost completely switch to git myself anyway.
>
> --
> David Rothenberger  ----  daveroth@acm.org
>
> divorce, n:
>         A change of wife.
>
> --
> Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
> FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
> Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
> Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
>

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple