Version 16 of Choice of SCM for the Tcl/Tk core

Updated 2003-07-16 16:42:40

Maintenance and development of Tcl's core is itself a substantial project, one which certainly benefits from disciplined use of SCM tools. As of July 2003, SourceForge has hosted this work (for several years?). There's sentiment to relocate Tcl's home to another technology and another site, because [enumerate reasons--unreliability; no change sets (excessive or excessively low-level e-mail); ...]. As CL understands matters, BitKeeper, Bugzilla, and CVSTrac are under consideration.


PT 16-Jul-2003: Bugzilla provides an extremely good bug tracking system that is highly configurable and significantly better than the SourceForge trackers with low software overheads (Apache, MySQL and Perl :( ).

I don't see much need to move away from a CVS-based version control system. Bitkeeper is more efficient but imposes a barrier to new contributors (ie: it costs--or does it? CL thought that, as a totally public project, Tcl would come under a no-charge BitKeeper license. Maybe Bryan can help here ...). The Tcl code base really isn't large enough to demand the increased efficiency over CVS. Any new site should continue to provide pserver- and ssh-based cvs access and should probably continue to provide cvsweb or equivalent web browsing of the cvs tree.


Bryan Oakley sez: yes, BitKeeper is free for open source projects such as Tcl.


JMN subversion may be worth a look. http://subversion.tigris.org It can run using its own network server or using Apache and webDAV. I'm not an experienced SCM user, but I managed to set this up easily enough and am currently storing some of my personal TCL projects in it. .. Oh, and it has a BSD-style license :)