OpenOffice.org SCM

OpenOffice.org is looking for a new SCM (Software Configuration Management) tool.

CVS has been an invaluable tool for OOo development in the past 6 years, as it has been for numerous other open and closed source projects of all sizes. CVS is robust and reliable and is able to cope with a very large code basis. But it's finally showing its age. The main complaints about CVS are:

tagging and branching are O(n) operations with n the number of files tagged resp. branched. The expense of a tagging/branching operation is also growing with the cumulated size of the history of each file which is affected by the operation. The OOo development model calls for numerous tags and branches and the time spend for creating them is painfully felt.
History preserving renaming and moving of files is awkward with CVS, and renaming directories is impossible at all.
The handling of binary files is error prone with CVS.
CVS does not support atomic commits.

The development model for OOo is based on so called 'child workspaces' (CWS). There is a lot to say about child workspaces but in terms of a SCM tool it basically means that all development is done on a branch, no matter if it's an one liner fix or a huge feature which touches half of the code base. We (the OpenOffice.org developer community) are quite satisfied with our development model, so we want a SCM tool which is able to cope with the CWS model, we are less interested in a SCM tool which imposes a completely different development model on us. Some adaptations to a new SCM tool are probably not avoidable, but in principle we would like a tool which is more or less a drop in replacement to CVS and just makes working with child workspaces smoother and much faster.

The requirements collecting phase has just started, the requirement document can be found here. There are at least two serious contenders for the new OOo SCM tool, my personal favorite so far is Subversion because it promises to be relatively easy to deploy and has all of the mandatory features and most of the desirable ones. OOo blogger Nils Fuhrmann shares this opinion. OOo blogger Jan Holesovsky on the other hand prefers git.

Here is some trivia about the OpenOffice.org CVS source code repository (as of Oct. 2006):

Size: 16 GiB.
Files: 197000
Directories: 24000
Top level projects: 132 (including language projects)
Active code modules: 200+
Branches: about 5000 branches (most of them partial branches)
Live branches: around 500
Tags: about 5000 (most of them partial tags)

tags:

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