"Tom Lane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Alvaro Herrera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Yes, it's nice. Consider this: Andrew develops some changes to PL/perl >> in his branch. Neil doesn't like something in those changes, so he >> commits a fix there. In the meantime, Tom has been busy with his own >> stuff and committing to the main branch; Andrew can track those changes >> by propagating from the main branch to his branch -- he doesn't need to >> fall behind and update his modified tree once a month and deal with >> umpteen conflicts. > > Yah know, the one bit of these pitches that always sounds like pure > snake oil is the claim that they offer some kind of mechanical solution > to merge conflicts. AFAICS that has nothing to do with the SCMS in use > and everything to do with whether your "diff" command is AI-complete.
Well there is some difference in that it's easier to do that when you have the common ancestor. But it has more to do with being able to see the changes other people are making. In the above scenario imagine Neil had just emailed the fix and Andrew hadn't seen it for a week. Or more importantly that Neil had emailed the fix and someone else had also emailed a different fix somewhere else. Because they couldn't see each others changes they have no idea when they're generating the patch that they're generating it against old versions. > I note also that CVS does have the ability to merge changes across > branches, we just choose not to use it that way. And the reason why, I assume, is because it's hard to grant access to CVS without granting access to do anything at all to the whole repository. And CVS is fragile enough that that's pretty scary. There are lots of ways someone could mess up a CVS repository. The distributed systems sound neat and do sound like they match our style of working. But they seem like a big leap for a project that's still using a buggy unmaintained pile of spaghetti code for fear of change. Subversion is the path of least resistance in that nothing has to change, we can choose to use new features if we want but otherwise it's basically a CVS 2.0 with a new name (and active maintenance). -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend