[Clipart] SVN or CVS to get the repository?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 01:55:50AM -0700, Open Clip Art Library Feedback Form wrote:
> I was wondering if there is an SVN or CVS (or any other easy to get
> RCS) repository for openclipart. That way I do not have to download
> the full tarball every time. Saves me & you bandwidth. But is also
> more friendly, since it just adds (instead of having to replace the
> old on) my local repository.
> I am especially thinking of the added simplicity for 3rd party
> projects to track the repository.
> 
> If not, please let me know, for I might be able to get such a
> repository going on our servers, if you are interested, that is.

Early on in the project we did put the clipart into CVS, however we
quickly found this to be pretty cumbersome, and we could tell that for
what we want to do long term in the back end, it would get in the way.

For instance, we want to be able to filter out unwanted clipart (e.g.
consider if you do not want anything with the 'nazi' or 'nudity'
keywords, or if you only want clipart that has scored '8' or higher).

Also, we would like to enable being able to lay out the directory
hierarchy in different ways.  For example, consider if you are a
biologist; you would love to have your plant and animal clipart all
organized by its scientific name.  However, if you are a volunteer at an
animal shelter, you would prefer to have all things related to 'dogs' in
one tree, including bones, fire hydrants, etc., and things related to
'cats' in another.  Along with this, we would eventually like to support
translations of the keywords, so that if you are a spanish speaker, each
dir in the hierarchy would be labelled in your native language.

So...  You can see that we're actually much more ambitious than just
having a version control system!  However, you're right that we need a
better way to distribute "deltas" of the clipart.

I have written a tool called 'dms' which will allow features such as the
ones described above, and which I think should allow us to do
distributed deltas of clipart as well.  It's a long ways from being
complete, but we've actually started testing it out this month, and I'm
hoping we will have it in full use by the end of the year.

Anyway, I haven't put much work into sorting out how to handle
deltas, but I agree it's important.  Would you like to help us figure
out a good approach for this?

Bryce