[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[David Cournapeau]

dmitrey wrote:
> As for me, I would wait until DVCS became more popular than svn. Jump 
> often from one VSC to another isn't a good idea, moreover, it's not 
> clear for now which DVCS will suppress others and became standard (being 
> installed in many OS by default).
I don't think one will become standard. Git will stay for sure, since it 
is used and developers by kernel hackers; it is used by at least two big 
open source projects: linux and xorg (as well as many freedesktop 
projects). bzr is pushed really hard by Canonical, and I don't think 
Canonical will be going away soon. Mercurial is used by Sun for all its 
open sourced projects. I don't see why this would be a problem.

On Linux, getting open source softwares is trivial, and windows has 
never been distributed with any VCS system :) Only mac os X has svn by 
default (if you install the dev tools at least). But as long as binary 
installers are available, I don't see that as a big problem either.

Now, the points you raised (concerning the popularity) have direct 
consequences on the availability of third party tools, which certainly 
is a problem to consider (GUI, etc...). As far as bzr is concerned, I 
would say that's the core problem (Gui on windows, integration with trac).
>
> Also, I would prefer (for example my openopt) changes being available 24 
> hours/day immediately after I have commit them; also, keeping them too 
> long only in my HDD makes data more vulnerable - computer viruses, often 
> electricity drops, other possible causes to lose data.
Nothing prevents you from putting the changes on a backup server: for 
example, bzr supports the concept of sending any commited changed to a 
'bound branch' automatically, to have a more svn-like workflow.

I certainly agree that changing the VCS is a big change, and requires a 
lot of thinking, though. I am not suggesting to change for the next week.

cheers,

David