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

[Paul Hummer]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:44:15 +0900, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
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.
> 

At a previous employer, we had this same discussion about switching to a DVCS,
and the time and cost required to learn the new tool.  We switched to bzr, and
while there were days where someone got lost in the DVCS, the overall
advantages with merging allowed that cost to be offset by the fact that merging
was so cheap (and we merged a lot).

That's a big consideration to be made when you're considering a DVCS.  Merges
in SVN and CVS can be painful, where merging well is a core feature of any
DVCS.

-- 
Paul Hummer
http://theironlion.net
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