[python-committers] Survey about DVCSs compared to svn

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 2009-02-26 00:46, Brett Cannon wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 15:35, Mark Hammond <mhammond at skippinet.com.au>wrote:
> 
>>> There's an option missing in that survey:
>>>
>>> [ ] I see a need to switch to a DVCS at all.
>> To be fair, the survey isn't asking about a switch, just how they compare
>> against svn.
>>
>> But I must admin that seems a little strange; while I just answered that I
>> believe hg and bzr are better than svn (I abstained re git), that *doesn't*
>> necessarily imply I would vote that they should replace svn for Python - I
>> might, but I might not - that is a much harder question than the one
>> presented.
> 
> 
> I guess I didn't make it clear enough in the survey. This is meant to gauge
> whether you think the DVCSs would be improvement over the status quo for us,
> which happens to be svn. I have changed the options to make it a comparison
> against the status quo and not svn specifically. If anyone wants to change
> their vote based on this clarification let me know and I will delete your
> initial answers.
> 
> So in MAL's case, you would say you think all the DVCS would be worse than
> the status quo as a way to vote that you don't want any change because the
> status quo is fine.

Note that I have abstained from voting on any of the DVCSes - simply
because I have no experience with them to make an educated decision, ie.
I can't say bzr is better or worse than svn.

That said, I don't have any major issues with the existing Subversion
setup and believe that adding bridges to DVCS systems is the more appropriate
approach to a project of this size than to switch the version control
system over completely.

Subversion was certainly a technical improvement over CVS which had
serious problems with branches, tagging and locks. The move to a DVCS
doesn't look as attractive as Subversion did at the time.

Looking at the PEP 374, the DVCSes don't appear to make life easier for
common repo tasks (they each require more or less the same number of
commands), so the argument for using a DVCS is more about giving non-core
developers access to a version control system they can use to track their
patches. However, this appears to be already solved using the bzr mirror.

> I am not going to delve any deeper into making a fancier survey because it
> just gets too convoluted in terms of how to present the questions, mining
> the data, dealing with bias and how people are just not built to rate
> things, etc.

At least to me, the survey looks biased already - namely that it puts
the second question before the first: "do we have a need to change
the system ?".

Perhaps you should do a survey on this question first ?!

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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