Position Paper for why the Gnome project should switch to Subversion.

     [ask Jon Trowbridge, Sander Striker, Karl Fogel for details]

So far this is just raw content.  Everything will be massaged for
presentation and diplomacy before being made public.


* Reasons to prefer Subversion to CVS.

  - Directories are versioned.
  - Copies, renames, and deletes are versioned.
  - Atomic commits.
  - Real changeset handles (revision numbers).
  - Branches and tags are versioned.
  - Branching and tagging are O(1) operations.
  - Symlinks are versioned.
  - Internationalized/Localized UI.
  - Versioning binary files is not horrifying in the repository.
  - Most merging is better (but as Sander points out, one case
    is slightly worse UI, the 'cvs update -j BRANCH_NAME' case).


* Reasons to prefer Subversion to Arch.

  - Subversion really is "like CVS".  Arch is not.
  - Subversion has a ton of documentation, even a printed manual.
  - Subversion has fantastic Windows support.
  - Delicately bring up the maintainership issue, if possible.
  - Everyone has Subversion nowadays, it's widely packaged.

  (But we should also list a few relative disadvantages, just to be fair.)


* Who has already switched to Subversion?

  - Samba, Ethereal, Zope, Xiph.org, Conectiva Linux, Mono,
    LinuxFromScratch.org, Trac, GNU Enterprise, Ingres (recently
    freed by ca.com), irssi, colloquy, subethaedit, SpamAssassin,
    neon, cadaver, APR, linux1394 ...

  - The Apache Software Foundation and Debian both have Subversion
    servers, for those projects that want to use it, but they don't
    mandate it.  (Sander will SUPPOSEDLY be converting the entire
    'httpd' project to Subversion at the Hackathon RSN.)

  - See http://subversion.tigris.org/propaganda.html for more.


* Wikipedia Winnitude

  The Wikipedia "Subversion" page is about Subversion; the Wikipedia
  "Arch" page is about curved structures capable of spanning a space
  while supporting significant weight.