[sane-devel] The future of the SANE-Standard

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

On Tue, 25 Dec 2007, Alessandro Zummo wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:19:58 -0600 (CST)
> kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu wrote:
>
>>
>> Still subscribed to your list after all these years, since the time that
>> the Canon N640U came out. As you are debating about SVN, I thought I might
>> share some of my experiences working on a similar project.
>>
>> The Gphoto project has converted over to SVN some time ago. It is a bit
>> different from CVS for the user, but it works OK, I think. I was not one
>> of those who was involved in doing the change and thus cannot report about
>> that, but it seems to have gone fairly smoothly.
>>
>> The differences from the developer-user's point of view:
>>
> [...]
>
> thanks for your contribution!
>
> most user will find svn quite compatible with cvs.. the basic commands 
> are luckly the same:
>
> add, commit, update, status

Ah, but it is wrong to assume that they have precisely the same 
functionality. They do not. In particular, "update" does not. To try to 
use it in the same way as it is used in cvs will get one's tail in a 
crack.

These minor differences take some getting used to; one is reminded of the 
saying that the English and the Americans are separated by a common 
language.

For me, a larger inconvenience has been the banishment of the Makefile 
from the individual driver libraries and the creation of a "master" 
Makefile in the directory containing them. The inconvenience is obvious 
for someone supporting a new device and going through a lot of minor code 
changes, reinstalls, and tests. If this change in Makefile structure is in 
fact needed in order to facilitate a change to SVN, then that is something 
to think about. You probably support about as many devices as we do.

Theodore Kilgore