Hi, I think that the current cvs repository plans from the ROOT team are an interesting step towards improving on the current open and collaborative environment but it should go further in a not too distant future. The cvs repository that Fons is going to introduce does have some nice advantages over the current situation. One immediate advantage is that from now on, any user will be able to easily access the source code for any particular release, and not just the latest one as in the current scheme. Another possible advantage, even-though this is obviously not going to be common, is to make it easier to introduce bug fixes for older versions. This might be necessary for some experiments that are soon going to need to select a production release from which they will be more than reluctant to upgrade just to obtain a single but important bug fix. It is an annoyance that you still need a binary distribution before being able to build ROOT from cvs (or even from cmz for that matter). The two reasons why the binary distribution is really needed are the dependency on a specific makedepend and the need, on some platform, for additional libraries (libXpm.a). The source of makedepend will also be available from the same cvs repository, so this is not necessarily a show-stopper. The Xpm library could also be added to the cvs repository but either a mechanism to conditionally download them need to be in place, either each distribution will be at least 400K larger, even for platform that do not need the extra libraries. In the longer term, I agree that ROOT need to move to an even more open type of repository. This is because the current model will only work as long as Rene and Fons continue to work full time on the ROOT project. As soon as [if] their availability decreases, the fact that only the two of them have write access to the main repository might become a problem for maintenance purpose. I think movement toward this more open scheme is more important that the exact solution implemented (cvs vs. BitKeeper) as long as more a modern, easy, open way for many developers to contribute. Philippe Canal, Fermi National Laboratory, (pcanal@fnal.gov)
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