Hi Dennis, On 14.06.2011 18:05, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
My impression, and it is only an impression, is that SVN is more transparent and the web interfaces for it are valuable as part of that. One problem with how I see git/hg being used is that work happens substantially out of view and there is a secondary process for pushing/pulling changes. (Patches are about the same in terms of diff submissions to someone who then applies them to something.) Also, merging and resolution of collisions, in my limited understanding, becomes the responsibility of the SVN committer and not a burden on someone who is curating the central code body.
A tool never it wrong or right, good or bad, it depends on how you use it. They way we used Mercurial at OOo combined the advantages of a DSCM with the transparency of a centralized SCM, at the cost of some release management burden. I have developed some models how we could reduce the latter until it nearly vanishes but still keep the advantages, but they never have been put into work.
Indeed merging and conflict resolution always should be a duty of the developers who caused them, not anybody else. But that is not a matter of the SCM, just a matter of how you use it.
These are only impressions and I need more experience before I can claim any expertise, but I find the git projects I have observed to be a little worrisome because they seem difficult to observe. Having a specific coherent on-line SVN repository that has the ground truth, that can be viewed on the web, and that can be moved into working collections by anyone has a great deal of appeal to me (plus I already use SVN for other purposes, so that's a factor as well). And staying updated on the part of the tree one is interested in (or all of it) is very straightforward with SVN.
On hg.services.openoffice.org you can see not only the "central" repositories of all OOo releases, but also the work done in child workspaces. So you have full transparency. OK, only if the developers committed and pushed their work, but that is not so much different to svn. If developers not only commit, but also push, there's not difference. Again, it's not the tools but how you use it.
The web interfaces and the tools around Mercurial are just great and there's nearly nothing you can't do. I'm sure that's the same with git.
Regards, Mathias
