On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 16:13 -0500, Bill Branan wrote:
> During our developer meetings last week, Eddie brought up the
> potential of switching from Subversion to Mercurial for source
> control. After doing some reading (and no actual experimentation) I
> wanted to put out my thoughts in order to get the conversation going
> again.
>  
> Benefits provided by Mercurial:
> - Performance gains when doing commits, diffs, and merges against what
> is currently in the central SVN repository
> - Ability to work completely offline (such as in an airplane)
> - Potentially promotes a more open feeling with regard to community
> members having the ability to commit code changes
> - Allows for private code experimentation without the need to make
> formal commits to formal branches
> - No more .svn directories everywhere

Not to muddy the waters too much, but I just switched to using git a few
weeks back and really like it.  These two articles helped me decide:
http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/distributed-revision-control-systems-git-vs-mercurial-vs-svn
http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2007/12/git_vs_mercuria_1.html

Git has git-svn making working with existing svn repos simple - I don't
know of such a tool in Mercurial.  Regardless, Mercurial and Git are
both needed updates for the VCS world, I'd support any migration to
them.

P

> Notes: 
> - We would still need a copy of the code acting as a central
> repository in order to perform backups and keep a continuously
> integrated trunk over which automated tests can be run
> - Merging would likely still need to happen with a centralized
> repository, otherwise the need to merge the same changes into multiple
> places could become a major headache, not to mention the issues
> related to keeping track of which changes have been merged where.
> 
>  
> Concerns: 
> - Committing locally means that until you merge your branch, none of
> your work is backed up. This puts the burden of consistent code
> backups on each developer.
> - SVN provides code-watch updates on each commit which helps
> developers keep track of what everyone else is doing. With local
> commits we would likely only see such messages on branch merge. In
> general, it seems that a central repository promotes more openness and
> communication than a distributed source model.
> - It's not clear how tagged releases would work with Mercurial.
> - We're requiring the community to become familiar with a new source
> control system in order to work with our code, could this be an
> unintentional barrier to entry?
>   
> Thoughts?
>  
> Bill
>  
> p.s. I found this blog posting (particularly the comment trail) to be
> particularly useful in thinking about the tradeoffs:
> http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=20
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
> Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
> Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
> http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
> _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-developers 
> mailing list [email protected] 
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-developers
-- 
Phil Cryer | Open Source Dev Lead | web www.mobot.org | skype phil.cryer


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
_______________________________________________
Fedora-commons-developers mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-developers

Reply via email to