[Python-Dev] PEP 374 (DVCS) now in reST

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

>
> Again, I don't take the cost of learning a new tool lightly, but
> please let's call that cost by its name, and not bring "distributed"
> into it.

I can only strongly agree on this point - most people asserting that
DVCS are much more complicated than CVS/SVN/etc..., forget their long
experience with the later. I had little experience with svn before
using bzr, and I find bzr much simpler than svn in almost every way,
both for personal projects and more significant open source projects.

>
> That's false.  Again, those people who want to use a DVCS as a DVCS
> will benefit from having the master repository(s) coordinate history
> for them.  This doesn't work very well across VCS systems, essentially
> forcing all committers who want to use the distributed features to
> coordinate with each other directly, and only with those who use the
> same DVCS.  The mental models used by git users, hg users, and bzr
> users differ significantly, though they probably differ more from the
> model that's appropriate for Subversion.  Nevertheless, there is a lot
> of potential benefit to be gained from having a common DVCS for all
> developers.

Agreed. A point shared by all svn-to-bzr/git/whatever in my experience
is the pain of merging. In particular, although git-svn on top of svn
is very useful, and brings some power of git without forcing git pain
on other users, merging between branches is not really doable without
going back to svn. And that's certainly a big plus of DVCS compared to
svn: since svn is inherently incapable of tracking merge (at least
until recently, I have no experience with 1.5), you can't use svn as a
backend and benefeting from all the DVCS advantages at the same time.

cheers,

David