Today in IRC there were plenty of congratulations for and among the Subversion developers. And they deserve it. It's been a long way and many people are looking forward to using the fruits of their labors. I know that many in the ASF are looking forward to "gutting CVS like a fish" and switching over to subversion. I know that I've been eagerly looking forward to it myself.

In recent months, my enthusiasm has dimmed a little bit because of arch. I really like the arch distributed repository model. For smaller, looser projects, I think that this style makes a lot of sense. It makes it easier for people to explore parallel incompatible approaches with less fear of merging. I'm doing a bunch of these kinds of little projects as well as working with larger more centralized projects, so there'll be space in my repertoire for both arch and subversion.

Back to the IRC today, another thing that I learned (which I haven't yet run into in my own work with arch) is that arch cannot version files with spaces in their names! This seems like a silly restriction to me. I also find the arch command set to be not quite intuitive, but passable. So arch is not without its own problems.

Something I've recently discovered is svk, which allows the use of subversion repositories in a decentralized fashion -- or so it seems. The one drawback is that it's written in perl, which is the same thing that turned me off the initial version of arch. It seems to be a running preference of distributed version control developers.

Except for Bram "Mr. Bittorrent" Cohen who has developed codeville a distributed repository version control system, which is written in Python. This looks interesting, but I've only gotten as far as the web page. If anyone has actually played with this, I'd be interested in hearing about it.