G'day rafael, On Sun, February 6, 2005 8:52 am, Rafael Laboissiere said: > I intend to orphan the prcs package. [...]
Please don't, or can someone else please adopt it. > This package is practically dead upstream, even if its author claims that > he > still intend to work on it. I have dreamed for a long time of PRCS Another way to describe it is "prcs is stable and reliable". There have been no changes to prcs for a long time because it does exactly what it claims with no serious bugs. IMHO this is the most important thing for a CM system. I know there _are_ bugs reported against prcs, but I have never hit any of them, and after reading through them it seems they are either minor (easy workarounds) or obscure. If it makes any difference, I would be willing to tackle reported bugs and submit patches. The only reason I haven't yet is I've never hit any. > replacing CVS worldwide, which could have happened if PRCS2 would have > come > out. Instead of keeping waiting for that, I converted myself to Subversion > and I must confess that I have no intention to use PRCS anymore. It is > too > bad, because PRCS is a very well written piece of software. > Unfortunately, > it is becoming a museum item. [...] There are still some things that prcs does much better than svn. In particular, branch/merge is badly broken in snv when compared to prcs. The branch/merge in prcs is so good I use it as a branch/merge tool for other revision control systems (including svn and cvs) by mirroring the upstream repository in a local prcs repository. I can then have as many "feature" or "experiment" branches as I want in the local repository, branching and merging to my heart's content, before commiting the desired combinations upstream. I also use prcs selectively as a backup tool. The compact RCS "delta" storage of prcs is much more efficient than svn's "directory per branch". I use it to revision control and backup the /etc/ directory on all my machines. I use one project with each machine as a different branch. Changes made to one machine can then be easily merged into other machines as I want. > Under these circumstances it makes no sense for me to keep the > maintainance > of the Debian package. For those distressed about losing PRCS forever, I > added a present in my last upload (version 1.3.3-3): a script, called > prcs2svn, which converts a PRCS project in a Subversion repository. It is > not perfect, but allows to store the history of your projects under PRCS > control in a SVN repository. I also contributed it to the prcs project at > SourceForge (but I am afraid it will never be released...). You can find > the script either in the Debian package or at: I note that you are listed as a developer for prcs on the SF project. I don't know what permissions you have, but you are probably in a position to fix bugs and release new versions upstream yourself. If you are serious about abandoning it, then perhaps you could add me as a developer and I could do some stuff? I know jmacd has been silent for years (working on other paid stuff I believe), but that gives everyone an excuse to step in and take over. He who does it, gets to decide how it gets done. Someone doing it badly is better than no-one doing it at all. The best way to get lots of good contributions is to make a few bad ones. > I was very pleased in maintaining the prcs package over 6 years. I wish > good luck to the next maintainer! Thanks for all the work... I have been really appreciating it. -- Donovan Baarda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
