[MLton] Subversion

[Stephen Weeks]

> I would like to suggest considering migration from CVS to SVN.

I've been thinking of making the same suggestion for a while.

> I have been using SVN for some time on my own (small) projects and
> the experience has been positive.

I've been using SVN for the last 4-5 months on a largish project and
have been quite happy.

> Now that the so called FSFS repositories are the default, the most
> annoying SVN repository maintenance issues are probably gone.

Yeah, the database helped to clinch my decision not to switch to SVN
when I looked at it last year.

> For me, the killer features of SVN are:
> [0. similarity to CVS; SVN is easy to learn,]
>  1. the ability to do (among other things) status queries and diffs
>     while not connected, and
>  2. ability to move files and directories.

I second these.  The speed from using local pristine copies is also
nice.  Finally, I've found the integrated log useful -- no need to
maintain a separate "commitlog".

The (potential) drawback for the MLton project would be losing old
revisions and tags.  I haven't played around with the SVN tools for
migrating CVS repositories, but I was less than enthused about their
accuracy after reading the documentation.  I'd be interested to hear
others' experiences here.  The right way to go might be to simply
freeze the CVS and start with a fresh import into the SVN.  We can
leave the CVS server up for read access for as long as we feel it's
useful to look at old stuff.

Another issue is timing of the migration.  I was thinking to move
immediately after the next release, which will hopefully be in a month
or two.  However, Matthew and I are about to start a branch for the
64-bit port, so it might be better to move to SVN ASAP.