[python-committers] Survey about DVCSs compared to svn

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> wrote:
> But, I did want to say thanks to Brett for sticking his face in this fan.
> :-)  It's a task of practically religious-war-proportions, and obviously is
> something there are a lot of opinions and concerns over.  Thanks for
> working on this.

Thanks to Brett in deed.

Would it help if I made a pronouncement? Let me express my personal
feelings. Note that I can still be swayed many ways, so don't consider
this a pronouncement, but perhaps it can serve as a catalyst for the
decision making process.

- Mercurial: IMO we can't go wrong with this. I've tried it a bit for
small projects, and it's very easy to learn for a SVN user. I've
talked to Bryan O'Sullivan, and I'm impressed by the customer list,
which includes Mozilla and Sun.

-  Bazaar: Probably okay, but I'm lukewarm about it. It is also
apparently still slower than Hg. It is married to Launchpad whose UI
continues to confuse and frustrate me (e.g. why is the "report a bug"
link so much more prominent on the overview page than the "download"
link?). I also am a little worried that Canonical is a little too
eager to get us as a "high profile customer". The good news is that
Bzr and Hg are so compatible that Bzr fans will be able to use Bzr
even if the master repository (probably on Benjamin's hard drive :-)
uses Hg.

- Keeping Subversion: This would sadden me, because merging really
sucks, even with the 1.5 merge tracking feature.

- Git: Too complex, and I've heard that a negative attitude prevails
in the Git  community.

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