[volunteers] brie

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Heather Stern (star at starshine.org):

> I can.  If the problem that has you contacting tthe DNS owner is that the MX
> records are hosed, then @svlug.org mail wouldn't be working to spec.  

For that, by tradition you first use the Administrative Contact in whois.

(Having the zonefile contact go somewhere different helps lessen SPoF
tendencies, if only by a hair.)

> I am familiar with cvs, svn, tla aka Gnu arch, and Hg aka mercurial, with my
> brains being most soaked in svn.  svn also has the advantage of extremely
> similar commandline to CVS.

And therein lies, also, the source of some of its particular ugliness.  
It's slow, ponderous, overfeatured, and doesn't support decentralised
operation.  It also doesn't handle renames.  And it stores snapshots
rather than changesets, which (like the failure to handle renames) is a
disappointing design failure given all the time and money poured into it
(about which, please see Martin Pool's
http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/derivatives.html ).

If I had to choose among the ones you cite, I'd pick mercurial.  

svn tends to win these choices solely because it's familiar and not
significantly broken, i.e., it's a mediocrity people can settle on, not
because of excellence.  

> I would, in theory, say I don't care which source control, but in practice, 
> I care that it's easy ennough we aren't constantly digging out our cheat
> cards at the sysadmin side of the game.

Learning curves are bad.  Let's never try anything new.  ;->

Comparison:  http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/scm.html