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Likewise for the BSD ports. There are advantages to both ways. However, a single repository permits changes to multiple packages in a single change. In Debia
by rleigh 8y ago
Likewise for the BSD ports.
There are advantages to both ways. However, a single repository permits changes to multiple packages in a single change. In Debian, simple transitions which affect multiple packages can take months or even years to fully propagate through the entire system. Not due to technical difficulty, but the logistics of coordinating the change.
Debian's approach made sense at the time. Developers who were widely distributed, communicating sporadically using dial-up internet connections, needed to be able to work independently and changes which had wide-ranging effects needed discussion and coordination. Nowadays, that can happen on a single merge request on GitLab. Homebrew can do such changes in a single pull request.
- wbl 8y agoWe've had CVS for years.
- mruts 8y agoAnd CVS is clearly the cutting edge of source control.
- rleigh 8y agoTrue, but it's not just the version control that's the important part. It's the infrastructure around it. Today, when you submit e.g. a homebrew PR, it gets comprehensively tested by CI builds, including rebuilding and testing all reverse dependencies on every supported platform version. The BSD ports changes are backed by poudriere builds of the entire collection, again on multiple versions. Services like GitHub and GitLab allow one to hook in all sorts of stuff and greatly improve the ease of submission of large- and small-scale changes, as well as making thorough testing and review both possible and accessible. Older projects are stuck with older entrenched tools and infrastructure, and haven't taken advantage to newer ways of doing things which newer projects have been able to adopt wholesale. The Debian tooling and infrastructure is certainly dated, but it's also of extremely high quality and very robust.