[python-committers] Survey about DVCSs compared to svn

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le jeudi 26 février 2009 à 17:10 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg a écrit :
> This is probably a matter of Internet connection bandwidth then.

Not really.
To give a point of comparison, when I clone (using Mercurial) the Python
trunk at http://code.python.org/hg/trunk, it takes 2 minutes 50 seconds.
That's for the whole trunk history from 1990 to today, and bandwidth is
around 500 KB/s (sustained) during the downloading.

So, having svnmerge take one minute or more from a machine hosted at the
same place as code.python.org points to a really slow merge
implementation IMO.

> I have no idea how much data gets transferred, but it doesn't
> "feel" slow.

It definitely feels slow when you merge from e.g. trunk to py3k.

> IMHO, those are all feel-good factors which can easily be had by
> installing a local Subversion repo copy (sync'ed using svnsync (*)),
> except perhaps regarding merging - but I don't know anything about
> in what way the DVCSes are better than Subversion.

I've never used svnsync, but I have already tried svk and it was a PITA
(that's what led me to try Mercurial, and then write hgsvn).