On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Ron W <ronw.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > In a discussion between a Git user and a user of both Mercurial and Git, > there was a debate of the relative merits of "named branches" vs "bookmark > branches". > > Mercurial (and Fossil) supports named branches (Mercurial recently added > support for bookmark branches). Git supports bookmark branches. > > With named branches, metadata is maintained to easily allow the branch > membership of any commit to be determined. > > With bookmark branches, only the branch head is tracked, so determining > branch membership is hard. > > The Git user's arguments against named branches are (1) name collisions > resulting from different people using the same names.* And (2) branch names > be immutable. > > Fossil allows two or more branches with the same name, so name collisions are not a technical problem. You might argue that having multiple branches with the same name is confusing to users. And there is a point to that. But, you can rename one or more of the branches to resolve the collision if desired. And, I will argue, have an occasional branch name collision is less confusing that the gyrations you have to go through to keep track of branch names in Git.
That said, Git and Fossil are designed for different development strategies. Git is geared toward having thousands of contributors, many of whom have never met each other, all contributed to the same project. Fossil, on the other hand, is designed for a close-knit development community that stays in constant communication. In the Fossil environment, branch names collisions just don't come up that often. To look at the difference another way, Git is designed for GPL projects where there are many writers. Git encourages drive-by patching. Fossil, o the other hand, is designed more for MIT/BSD/Public-Domain projects where there are many fewer writers but more readers. Drive-by patches are discouraged. -- D. Richard Hipp d...@sqlite.org
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