RE: [chairs] Recommendations for Version Control System!

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

It doesn't look like CMIS is going to be looking at versioning in the
source-control sense any time soon (they mention WebDAV as related work, but
not DeltaV).

I think the current stability and ubiquitous deployment of Subversion makes
it the SHOULD case, and there has to be good reason not to use it.  It is
also valuable that distributed versioning systems like git (I don't know
about Mercurial) have adapters in and out of Subversion so, from my
preference for off-line use, I can have my cake and eat it too, with or
without a local-machine hosting of Subversion.  There are also Subversion
gateways into Microsoft Team Server style systems, such as CodePlex. (I
forget what I once knew about Eclipse, though confident Subversion support
is there along with CVS.)

I am not so sure that a source-code versioning system is all that
well-suited for standards development work, and even building repositories
of sample documents related to conformance work.  If there is software
involved, that's a different matter.

An important consideration in using such a system is whether it is hosted by
OASIS or not.  The advantage of hosting by OASIS is that the IPR rules and
considerations for contributions, whether by a TC membership or public
submitters (similar to public commenters), would presumably be handled for
anyone having write access, although there could be open read access and a
web interface, features that Subversion hostings provide for.  Dealing with
submission provenance and curation is important for TC work.

Finally, I think consideration of bug tracking is valuable, as are
change-management support.  I notice in my own experience with errata for
the ODF specifications that a bug tracking system is important in making
sure that we are attentive to public comments, that in-TC counterparts of
comments are preserved and tracked, and that tracking of the impact of
new-edition changes on existing approved standards are managed properly.
Having tool support for this strikes me as very important, and a
bug-tracking mechanism might be pressed into that service rather well.
There appears to be too much friction in the current Kavi functionality to
do tracking easily.  A wiki can help, but something more structured and
systematic, if set up with care, can be much more easily used and the
content maintained reliably.

 - Dennis

PS: I didn't know, until I started receiving posts to this list, that a TC
Secretary is viewed somewhat like an unelected committee officer as far as
OASIS lists and such are concerned.  Makes sense, just wasn't expecting it.
I will now see if my receiving the list allows write privileges. (If there
is an archive, I haven't found it.)

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org 


-----Original Message-----
From: Duane Nickull [mailto:dnickull@adobe.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 19:05
To: Norman Walsh; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [chairs] Recommendations for Version Control System!

Let's see what CMIS brings.

;-)


On 28/10/08 6:25 PM, "Norman Walsh" <ndw@nwalsh.com> wrote:

> azydron@xml-intl.com writes:
>> SVN, no ifs or buts! It is the only way to go.
> 
> Well, something more peer-to-peer like Mercurial has advantages too.
> The ability to do commits when I'm on a plane is very nice.
> 
> That said, svn is probably the most straightforward choice.
> 
>                                         Be seeing you,
>                                           norm

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