Re: dVCS vs. CVS

[Tassilo Horn]

Yavor Doganov <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Yavor,

> 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.

I disagree.  With CVS the basic workcycle for non-members looks like

  cvs up
  <edit>
  cvs up # To check there're no conflicts
  cvs diff > foo.patch
  <email patch to emacs-devel>

With git (or any other dVCS) it'd be something like

  git-pull # pull from origin
  <edit>
  git-pull
  git-commit -m "Foo bar"
  git-format-patch origin
  <email patch to emacs-devel>

So basically the only difference is that you have to commit to your
local repository.  As long as you don't use more advanced functions of
the dVCS, there's nothing more complicated.

> 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.

I guess that's not a good comparison, because those are pretty boring
projects for most people.

Another project that switched from CVS to git recently is stumpwm, and
this project now has a hundfull of contributors now instead of only one.

Bye,
Tassilo