[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[Fernando Perez]

On Jan 4, 2008 11:45 AM, Ondrej Certik <ondrej at certik.cz> wrote:

> David is 100% right, I fully support this. I would be just repeating
> what he says.
>
> Charles actually said another point in favor of Mercurial - it works
> on Windows (at least people say so), while git not that much (at least
> people say so). I never use Windows myself, so I don't know.

FWIW, we (ipython) have also gone around a few times on this, and
would like (at some point to switch to a DVCS as well).  I think the
benefits are many, so I won't rehash it here, others have done it
well.

One point that hasn't been mentioned is how useful a DVCS is when
doing dev sprints: people can work and sync off their own private
repos without touching SVN, with lots and lots of cross-developer
information flow that doesn't affect the main server or even other
devs.  In fact, when doing sprints I always end up making a local hg
repo just for that purpose, and then committing back to svn upstream
at the end of the sprint.

As much as git looks really good, the Windows issue is, I think, a
deal killer: last I checked support was poor, and I think our core dev
tools should be truly, 100% cross-platform without any discrimination
(kinda-sorta-works on platform X isn't enough).

My vote so far is for hg, for performance reasons but also partly
because sage and sympy already use it, two projects I'm likely to
interact a lot with and that are squarely in line with the
ipython/numpy/scipy/matplotlib world.  Since they went first and made
the choice, I'm happy to let that be a factor in my decision.  I'd
rather use a tool that others in the same community are also using,
especially when the choice is a sound one on technical merit alone.

Just my 1e-2...

f