Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Eric S. Raymond]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden>:
> Does this mean there is no concept of "trunk"?  When someone who is
> not normally a participant in the project decides to "download the
> current sources", which revision does he get?  More precisely, what
> determines which revision he gets?

The "current sources" is generally going to be one of the repo tip revisions
packaged into a tarball by a release manager.  This is not a VCS operation.

If you clone the repo, you get the entire history -- the entire DAG of 
revisions.  Technically speaking, there is no "trunk", no distinguished
branch that VCS operations treat specially.  If you do an update without
specifying a release or branch name, you simply get the latest 
sequential revision.

Socially, the "trunk" is probably the branch the last release tarball
was taken from.  Some of these systems support named branches.  When 
that's so, you can label a branch "trunk" if you like.  
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>