For a long time now we have had serious performance issues with the MonetDB CVS repository on Sourceforge. MonetDB B.V. has bought a machine that is to be used as the host for the public repository for MonetDB. This means that at some as yet undecided point in the near future (i.e. fairly soon) we will move the repository away from Sourceforge and to this new machine. In the process we will also convert the current CVS repository to a new and more modern type, namely Mercurial (also known as hg). Mercurial is a so called distributed version control system (DVCS). This means that every developer has his/her own complete copy of the repository and can make any changes they want to it. In order to share any results, developers with the right access rights can "push" their changes to the central repository, and anyone can "pull" changes from that repository to their own. Mercurial (like its competitors git and bazaar) is very good at managing this push/pull work, merging changes from different sources and keeping track of what has actually changed (as opposed to what the end result looks like, which is what CVS and Subversion (SVN) do). Read-only access to the Mercurial repository will of course be possible for anyone. This only requires the HTTP protocol. Read-write access to the repository will require an SSH public/private key pair (of which you will need to keep the private part, well, private; the public part will need to be sent to me--I will contact you for that). Because Mercurial is distributed, we can work in a slightly different way than we used to with CVS. A group of core developers will have read-write access. They can make their copy of the repository (or one of their copies) available for their students who can develop and push their changes to this copy. Once the core developer is satisfied with the changes he/she can push those changes to the main repository. This way of working has several big advantages: - Any developer can store changes (with appropriate log messages) in their copy of the repository, safeguarding those changes, even if they are not yet fully developed. - Once changes are mature enough to share, they can be shared. - We don't need to give lots and lots of people write access to the main repository. Currently there are a large number of people with write access to the repository at Sourceforge of whom I don't know whether they still need the access. The new machine will do more than just serving the repository. It will also be used as the MonetDB webserver, and we have plans to switch over to another bug tracking system (bugzilla) that is to run on this system. An interesting intro into Mercurial usage can be found here: http://hginit.com/00.html. -- Sjoerd Mullender