Re: Fwd: Subversion packages

[David Rothenberger <daveroth@acm.org>]

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provide (a somewhat out-of-date) 1.7 version as "prev" and the latest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