On 9/11/07, Adam Schreiber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 9/11/07, Vincent Untz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Hrm. I'm not sure that this statement ("_very_ strong general opinion")
> > is true. Some people feel this is the way to go, and some are pushing
> > very hard for this, but there are also people who don't really care and
> > wonder if we need this.
>
> As a maintainer for a smaller project where there are only 2 regular
> contributors (who are both maintainers), I count myself in the "Why
> would we need this for our project category?".The advantages of a distributed system are not necessarily related to the number of regular contributors. In fact often it's most helpful for those that aren't regular contributors so that they can commit patches periodically even if they don't have an official svn account. But beyond that, distributed systems *must* make it easy to branch and merge due to the very nature of distributed development. So even if you don't actually use the tools in a distributed way (you can still use these systems in essentially the same centralized way that you could with CVS / subversion), they still give you the great branching and merging features. This is a killer feature for me and is reason enough to use it (i use git on personal projects that don't have any external contributors, for instance, simply because of this feature). You may say "we don't really use branches". Well, I never really did when I was using subversion either, because it was so difficult to merge back easily. But when the tool makes it easy to merge things back and forth, you start using branches regularly. And it makes it so much easier to use good development practices (e.g. developing independent features independently, making small, self-contained commits, etc) when you do it this way. Add to that the fact that it allows you to make commits offline, and only deliver to the central repository when you've got things in a reasonably good working order, and other things like that. So I guess my point is that you shouldn't think of a distributed version control system only in terms of how it enables distributed development. There are other reasons to recommend it as well. -- jonner _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
