Question about Source Control

[Cameron Simpson]

On 21Mar2014 09:34, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:19 AM, Gregory Ewing
> > Also, unless the project is truly ancient, the
> > whole history might not be as big as you expect.
> > The code presumably grew to its present size
> > incrementally, in an approximately monotonic
> > manner, so the sum of all the diffs is probably
> > about the same order of magnitude as the current
> > code size.
> >
> > As an experiment, I just cloned a copy of the
> > CPython repository, and it's about 300MB. A
> > tarball of Python 3.2 that I downloaded and
> > compiled earlier is about 75MB. That's a ratio
> > of about 4, and CPython is a pretty ancient
> > project!
> 
> Yep! But cloning requires that you have Mercurial installed and, more
> importantly, know how to use it. We don't have a huge proliferation of
> source control systems these days, but if someone says "Our code is
> available via Perforce", I'm going to just look for a tarball
> download, rather than figure out a source control system I don't know.

Someone intending to clone the project and develop will probably
want the whole repository; as Gregory says - they can then easily
push/pull with others.

For Frank, the size of the repo is not the size of the bare code *
number of changesets. There are many diff-level steps in there,
making for a much smaller size. And code is small; really really
small.

Regarding having Mercurial installed, that is very easy, and after
you've gone (eg):

  hg clone https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css my-copy-of-cameron's-css

(or wherever the public repository is published), you can of course
then walk away and work. You no longer need the public copy at all.

With a DVCS the threshold is low and the advantages are high (hg
or git; I'm an hg person myself).

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has
printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
        - English Professor, Ohio University