Re: Revision control

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Am Donnerstag 19 Juni 2008 00:46:55 schrieb olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net:
> > Once the Hurd has reached 1/100 of the RCS traffic of Linux, a switch
> > to a powerful tool might be feasable.
>
> That's like saying that it's only useful to run GNU/Linux on very large
> servers, because others don't need the power...

No. 

It's like deciding to go on a trip through the country together and 
saying: "We don't need racing cars which run only on a small subset of the 
roads and have fancy controls most of us have to learn from scratch. We want 
to drive together to a place we don't necessarily know already." 

If we'd go to a racing competition, then racing cars would be useful. If we 
want to go on a quite normal trip together, where pushing the limits of our 
cars isn't our main objective, since we just want to reach our destination, 
then I prefer avoiding the racing car in favor of a slightly slower car which 
can get us to our destination which we can all drive without hitting the 
trees several times and which just works. 

With Git I already hit the trees several times, and I want to spare others 
that experience. 


The difference you name would in my opinion be better described by saying, we 
only need OpenBSD on the most critical servers, because for the others, its 
gain in security isn't worth the effort to set it up correctly and the time 
to learn its quirks. Would you use OpenBSD in a university as shared working 
server for people? 

We only need the racing car, if we want to go on a race in having the most 
complex version control workflow. But the easier controls of Mercurial help 
us in every situation, and they especially help newbes to avoid hitting the 
trees or having to replace tires. 


One reason for wanting to be able to drive many different roads: The 
informatics professor from whom I learned about the Hurd uses Windows on his 
presentation machine (on which he also works quite often), and he wouldn't be 
able to use Git efficiently in that environment. 

Sure you can tell him "use your VMWare", but why not choose something which he 
can use in whatever mode he is just now? 


> There is probably a difference between a project with a single
> contributor, and a project with more than one. But otherwise, the size
> or activity of a project has very little influence on what kind of
> things the developers need or want to do regarding version control.

Just look at the workflows in Linux and in other projects. As far as I know, 
there is a huge difference. 

Linux works at one end of the spectrum, where the devs can force people to 
learn their ways to the letter, because people want to contribute very badly 
(else they would likely already leave when seeing the tone in the lkml 
mailing list), and where very many people contribute to a partly monolitic 
codebase in which about 40% of the sourcefiles change between two versions. 

But the Hurd isn't in the position to force devs to learn new ways to 
contribute (not that I like forcing people to do something they don't need). 
It needs developers to be able to jump in easily, and every programmer lost 
on that way due to an infight with Git would hurt quite much. 

And Xen, xine, SymPy, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, NetBeans and many others aren't 
really one-dev projects, so they should be enough hard proof, that Mercurial 
works well for bigger projects. 


But in the end, much about the current distributed version control systems 
depends on gut feeling, personal preferences and the needs of the specific 
project, since they are quite similar, and there is one big shiny light at 
the end of the decision tunnel: 

Whatever we choose, the technical side of switching the files and all history 
from one to another is very easy, since there are simple automated tools for 
the task (Git to Mercurial as well as Mercurial to Git). 

Best wishes, 
Arne
-- 
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Heißt politisch sein
Ohne es zu merken. 
- Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

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