Re: dVCS vs. CVS

[Yavor Doganov]

Bastien wrote:
> 
> The risk of switching to a dVCS is not one of loosing
> functionnalities, but one of loosing those developers who don't want
> to learn a new tool (I don't think there are any here...?)

Maybe there aren't, and probably what I am going to say does not
relate at all to the Emacs project.  But there are two important
things that were missed in that huge thread:

Lifting the barrier -

dVCS (and the fact that there are many of them) are a nightmare for
contributors who are not programmers, like translators and
documentation writers.  A dVCS is a sophisticated tool and a
complicated concept that such people do not understand, or at least
they do after substantial investment of time and sweat.

Not a silver bullet -

Autoconf, Automake, m4, Gnulib and other projects switched to Git some
time ago.  One would expect that there will be an avalanche of new
contributors who were not volunteering only because they needed a
modern VCS to go ahead.  False assumption -- pretty much the same
people hack on these projects after the switch.