bzr-svn: now with its own Subversion Python bindings

bzr-svn has always been using the standard Python bindings that were provided with Subversion itself. Unfortunately, I had to fix some issues in these bindings since they were incomplete or broken and thus bzr-svn has always depended on a development snapshot of Subversion.

As of today, bzr-svn is using its own Python bindings for Subversion.

There were several reasons for switching to our own bindings:

• There are no requirements for backwards compatibility within bzr-svn. This means the API can be made sane without worrying about the mess it was in the past and users who still rely on that.
• Deployment. It took 2 years for my fixes to the Subversion Python bindings to be part of a release. It'll be even longer before Subversion 1.5 makes it into most available distributions. That makes it very hard to just download and install bzr-svn.
• They're in plain C, not SWIG. SWIG has a big advantage for the Subversion folks since it can generate python, ruby, java or tcl bindings all at once without a lot of overhead per language. However, it has issues as well that make it a bad choice for bzr-svn.
  • It generates inefficient code - it generates proxy classes that
  • Bindings tend to be very much like the C API rather than "Pythonic". To make them more Pythonic, you need tons of typemaps. For example, the Python bindings in bzr-svn provide an iterator when browsing the revision history rather than a callback as C and the SWIG bindings do.
  • Hard to write - personally at least, I write bindings in C faster than in SWIG
  • Adds an extra dependency to the build process. Several people had trouble building Subversion on their Mac machines because they didn't have the right version of SWIG available.

Since all of the patches that bzr-svn depended on previously were in the Python bindings for Subversion, it is now possible to use bzr-svn with any version of Subversion newer than 1.4.0. Of course, you do need to have the development headers installed as well.

cp: Kathleen Edwards - Independent Thief

Syndicated 2008-06-22 18:17:42 from Stationary Traveller