Taking Vesta Into Use
I am an old ClearCase user, working for a company developing commercial software. My company is interested in OpenSource, and I'd like to offer an alternative to subversion. Is Vesta a credible one?
(KenSchalk) I would certainly say that Vesta is a credible alternative, but then I use it every day and am employed to work on maintaining and improving it so I may be biased. It's worth pointing out that there are a lot of other free software alternatives that you may want to explore. Vesta's most distinguishing feature is it's advanced build system which provides several useful capabilities and is, as far as we know, the only one that provides a strong guarantee of build repeatability.
There are various issues:
it ought to be available in a reasonable future on many more platforms, starting with Windows. (KenSchalk) See WhyNoWindowsPortYet. I skimmed the FAQ, and could consider contributing ports, but I'd like to have a feeling about the effort involved, as well as of the support to be expected, first and foremost from other potential users of the ports.
- therefore some questions about the users community of Vesta:
who uses it? (KenSchalk) See WhoUsesVesta.
- who could consider using it, who currently doesn't? Why and why not?
(KenSchalk) Vesta would be most interesting to people who need superior build capabilities. It guarantees build repeatability even across remote sites. It encapsulates all build inputs, including the tool chain. It detect dependencies automatically at the filesystem level. It re-uses previous build results in a way that's guaranteed to be safe even across users. It can parallelize build work across a large number of machines.
why isn't "the OpenSource" using Vesta? What do you think, guess, know?
(KenSchalk) I believe the reason more people in the open source/free software world aren't using it is that they don't see guaranteed build repeatability or tool chain versioning as particularly useful. Because free software generally has to build in a very diverse set of compilation environments, its developers perceive that versioning the build environment like other sources as a waste of effort. I don't agree with this viewpoint as it makes it very simple to build code changes with multiple different tool chains. (I typically do development with a single tool chain but build with several others before checking it.)
- I think I'll download and install Vesta on an Linux box. Is there a forum appropriate for sharing experience?
In this wiki, maybe? (KenSchalk) Perhaps. If you want to type up notes about your experiences I'd suggest creating a page for that, maybe UserImpressions.