forrestthewoodsHere is my best attempt to articulate why I believe all dependencies, including compiler toolchains, belong in version control.
https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/
Morten Hilker-Skaaning@forrestthewoods what about using SVN instead of git? If everyone is constantly syncing against the same server, what's the advantage of being distributed?
Josh Simmons@morten_skaaning i don't think the vcs actually matters that much. the main reason not to ship the toolchain is that they tend to be enormous and a huge pita to untangle from their installers.
@dotstdy then put the installers in svn.
@morten_skaaning putting the installers in helps a bit, but then you still have a really poor experience, and people have to manually run the installer and you need to correctly use the installed version over whatever else is on the workstation. it's a struggle. :/
James Widman@dotstdy @morten_skaaning maybe we need to start asking toolchain vendors to package their toolchain such that it's trivial to commit to a VCS
@JamesWidman @morten_skaaning yeah it's something I think you'll find is often begged for from the game dev community at least. With mixed success. :')
@morten_skaaning TBH I haven’t used SVN in 20 years. I’m not sure its modern feature set. It’s never really impressed me though.
@forrestthewoods the feature is that you can download exactly the snapshot you need of the global state and it handles large binary files...
@morten_skaaning is there any reason to use SVN over Perforce? Other than cost?
@forrestthewoods not to my knowledge...
Bartosz Taudul@forrestthewoods @morten_skaaning SVN was designed as a direct replacement for CVS, and included such novelties as tracking the state of the entire repository tree, rather than per-file checkouts, or branches that you could actually understand how to use.
Anyone who has used CVS is not laughing at the circus.
@wolfpld @forrestthewoods I can't tell whether irony or sarcasm is used here?
@morten_skaaning @forrestthewoods No sarcasm this time. The majority of open source projects were using CVS at the time, and switching to SVN was a huge quality-of-life improvement.
@morten_skaaning @forrestthewoods Well, I guess my sarcastic tone that you read was directed at how shitty CVS was.
Anders Stenberg@wolfpld @morten_skaaning @forrestthewoods SVN was an incredible breath of modern fresh air over CVS.
I still prefer SVN over git in a lot of ways even though git obviously has some upsides as well. It just feels like the world collectively gave up on it and moved on. (At least the public world, I know a lot of closed source stuff still runs it successfully.)