Re: RFC: Central version control for Debian
On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 04:54:16PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> Recent discussions about auditing have gotten me thinking about Debian's use of
> version control (or lack thereof). Currently, the situation is left in the
> hands of individual developers. Many of them use CVS; some use other methods;
> some use no version control at all.
>
> OpenBSD's best weapon in their auditing efforts is their CVS tree. They have
> access to all of the code in one place, with a complete change history. Why
> not set up something similar for Debian? To start, uploaded packages could be
> automatically imported into 'source' and 'debian maintainer' branches. This
> would, at the very least, allow for easy diffs between versions.
>
> Eventually, it would be nice to allow maintainers to commit changes to the
> repository. Things get much more complicated here. Debian has a lot more
> developers than OpenBSD, and we seem to make changes much more frequently.
> Developers could easily step on one another's toes. Package maintainers need
> to be able to ensure that they don't miss ANY changes that are made to their
> packages, lest unexpected bugs arise (or worse, malicious ones).
I sincerely doubt that this is, or ever would be, practical. The
resources involved in a CVS repository of the size of our source tree
are staggering.
Dan
/--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\
| Daniel Jacobowitz |__| SCS Class of 2002 |
| Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Carnegie Mellon University |
| dan@debian.org | | dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu |
\--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
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