[Paraview] Paraview/Kitware site down

[Olesen, Mark]

I've been thinking about this for quite some time, but the website(s)
being down prompted me to finally post it.

I know that Paraview and VTK have been using cvs for a very long time,
but perhaps it might be time to consider migrating to a more modern
source code management (SCM) system - for example, git.
At the moment (with the cvs repository being down), a vital point of git
is that it is a truly distributed SCM. With git it's possible to have
mirrored sites (eg, http://repo.or.cz) at no extra cost. And it is also
possible to continue to work and commit on a personal local branch
without the reference repository being online at all.

There are, of course, a huge number of other advantages, but rather than
rehash everything I'll just give two urls:

  http://versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/CVS/Git/index.html
  http://whygitisbetterthanx.com

The second site (despite the name) does provide objective numbers in the
comparison and also gives a good quick overview of a few types of
workflows possible with git. Since the Linux kernel is managed with git,
presumably Paraview/VTK should not pose a problem.

Even if the developers wish to continue with cvs, a git mirror would be
possible. Here is a posting about how the emacs cvs has been mirrored to
git:
  http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org/msg12529.html

Having local access to the cvs repository would certainly be a huge
advantage when creating the initial git mirror.  Another alternative
would be to start with a "big bang" and simply freeze the cvs repository
at a particular point and start with git as of a particular snapshot. It
would, of course, be better (and nicer) if either of these were
officially sanctioned by Kitware.

How much willingness would there be for modernizing the SCM used?

/mark
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