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

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Giovanni Bajo <rasky at develer.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:31:55 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Paul Hummer <paul at eventuallyanyway.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> I hear you. I for one have been frustrated (now that you mention it) by
>> the inability to track changes across merges. We do lots of merges from
>> the trunk into the py3k branch, and the merge revisions in the branch
>> quotes the full text of the changes merged from the trunk, but not the
>> list of affected files for each revision merged. Since merges typically
>> combine a lot of revisions, it is very painful to find out more about a
>> particular change to a file when that change came from such a merge --
>> often even after reading through the entire list of descriptions you
>> still have no idea which merged revision is responsible for a particular
>> change. Assuming this problem does not exist in DVCS, that would be a
>> huge bonus from switching to a DVCS!
>
> Well, not only it does not exist by design in any DVCS, but I have a
> better news: it does not exist anymore in Subversion 1.5. You just need
> to upgrade your SVN server to 1.5, migrate your merge history from the
> format of svnmerge to the new builtin format (using the official script),
> and you're done: say hello to "-g/--use-merge-history", to be use with
> svn log and svn blame.
>
> This is a good writeup of the new features:
> http://chestofbooks.com/computers/revision-control/subversion-svn/Merge-
> Sensitive-Logs-And-Annotations-Branchmerge-Advanced-Lo.html

Unfortunately I've heard we shouldn't upgrade to svn 1.5 until more
Linux distributions ship with it by default.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)