On Jan 5, 2008 4:21 PM, Chris Barker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > hmmm. Everyone posting so far seems to be positive on this idea, but I'm > not so sure. A few thoughts: > > 1) change is bad. It may be worth it, but this decision needs to be made > very differently than if we were starting from scratch.
Change for the sake of change is bad. I thought I highlighted in my email that the difficult point was how to make the change (transition, importing the history, etc...), but instead, it quickly slipped to using mercurial. I would have prefered to see what people thought was important on how to proceed, but we all prefer to speak about which tool to use instead :) > > 2) apparently svn merge sucks compared to other merge technology. svn > (and cvs before it) is the only system I'm used, and yes, merging is > painful, but I have to say that it appeared to be painful because it's a > very hard problem. Can anyone comment on why these other systems seem so > much better? Does it have anything to do with Centralized vs. > Distributed at all? > Merge is a hard problem, but DVCS have to solve it to be of any use. > 3) I read Linus' post -- he's quite articulate. However, it seems that > most of his arguments really applied primarily to large projects -- > where there really will be a lot of different "central" versions. This > is very, very, important to the Linux kernel, and probably good for kde, > but scipy is a monstrously smaller community. And it's not a question of > number of devs -- but rather number of versions. > > This makes me thing it really comes down to a better merge -- is there a > way to address that problem with svn? maybe the svnmerge.py that Russel > suggested? svnmerge just does not cut it, when I was saying that merge in svn does not work, I was not even considering basic svn merge, but svnmerge. svnmerge does not change much: merge still fails more often than not, and you have to do a lot of manual things. In DVCS, merge is one command, you do not need to initialize anything when you start. But DVCS is much more than better merge. And has nothing to do with the size of the project.As I said, the whole concept of sandbox, trying new things, is made harder by using svn; it really goes in the way, instead of helping us. > > 4) SVN is very, very, popular. Lots of folks use it, they use it on all > common platforms, and there are tons of clients for it. I work with a > bunch of folks that really don't like a command line (for programmers, I > think that's just plain weird, but there you go). I could never sell a > VCS that didn't have a decent GUI client on Windows and OS-X. > I don't understand this argument: do your co-workers use scipy now but would not if the code source would be kept under a VCS which has no GUI ? scipy and python are fundamentally command line tools, and you cannot contribute to scipy without using the command line. We do not require python, distutils to have a gui ? cheers, David _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
