[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[Ondrej Certik]

On Jan 6, 2008 12:55 AM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2008 8:25 AM, Stefan van der Walt <stefan at sun.ac.za> wrote:
> > I recall something you said to David last week, regarding merges with
> > SVN: that a person never knows how to do it until *after* you've done
> > it!  We often make branches in scipy and numpy, and stand a lot to
> > gain from a distributed RCS.
> >
> > Once a person knows how to use SVN, it doesn't take much effort at all
> > to learn bzr or hg (even the commands are often the same).  The main
> > change is a mind-shift: that branches are now a lot friendlier, and
> > that they are accessable to everybody.
>
> I understand that DVCS's do merging better.  But what I don't really
> understand is why this is an inherent advantage of DVCS.   Isnt it
> just a matter of the current crop of DVCS's implementing a better
> merge algorithm than SVN?  The SVN guys seem to be competent, so if
> you just give them time surely they will eventually incorporate these
> better merging algorithms into SVN.  Who wouldn't want better merging?

It's not just about merging. But anyway, all arguments were already said in
this thread. I fully agree with both Davids and Fernando.

So let's setup an official mercurial mirror, that will automatically download
all svn commits.

That way, we can easily work with Mercurial, clone the repos, browse history,
everything. Review patches. And then, when the patches are reviewed, instead
of pushing them to the Mercurial repo, they will be committed using svn.
No big deal, everyone is happy.

We did it too in sympy, at the beginning, because we
were afraid of switching (it was mainly me, who was afraid, because
I am very conservative, that's why I use Debian:). But then, once you try
DVCS, you never want to come back.

Ondrej