[evs] status evs

[Arthur Barrett]

> What happened with the development of evs, what is the status and is there
> already a stable version?

Have you been testing the beta?  We'd love some more feedback...

The project is still going strong, with well over 40 hours a week spent on 
it.  You can see the commits on the cvsnt-commits newsgroup (any commits not 
on CVSNT_2_0_x and not on CVSNT_BRANCH_2_5_03_2382 are for EVS).

I've been testing builds looking for a new 'beta' to post for the past 
couple of weeks.  Talking with Tony yesterday it's very likely that I'll 
have a new beta to post this week (provided I get enough time to update the 
documentation).

The reasons for the additional delays will be explained in my notes on the 
next release, however the short explanation is that it's been more work than 
we anticipated - even as recently as three months ago we felt we'd seen off 
the worst of the delays only to be hit with more when we looked into Audit 
and also SVN 1.5 mergepoint compatibility.

The good news is that things are now coming together very quickly and that a 
FOSS stable release is probably not far away (dont' ask for a date), then 
our attention turns to the features we require for the 'commercial' release.

We still have not written a 'migrator' to take an existing repository and 
port it to EVS - that'll be one of the last things we do.  Tony and I have 
discussed the migration approach on and off and we'll probably have to start 
getting more serious about that next week or the one after.

March Hare are currently only working on the windows 2003+SQL Server release 
and leaving it to volunteers to look at the linux/postgres stuff (though the 
code is all written as portable).  We'll probably aim to have commercial 
support for something other than windows fairly early, but we are currently 
talking to customers about their preferred corporate platforms - the current 
frontrunnder would be Solaris Sparc 10 + Oracle 10g though more and more 
customers are saying that they are perfectly happy to run the windows based 
server (perhaps with an Oracle backend on Unix).

Regards,


Arthur Barrett