Bryan O'Sullivan wrote: > However, it's worth pointing out that with a distributed SCM - it > doesn't really matter which one you use - it is simple to put together a > workflow that operates in the same way as a centralised SCM. You lose > nothing in the translation. What you gain is several-fold:
That may be off-topic for python-dev, but can you please explain how this works? > * Outsiders get to work according to the same terms, and with the > same tools, as core developers. I'm using git on the kernel level. In what way am I at the same level as the core developers? They can write to the kernel.org repository, I cannot. They use commit, I send diffs. > * Everyone can perform whatever work they want (branch, commit, > diff, undo, etc) without being connected to the main repository > in any way. So what? If I want to branch, I create a new sandbox. I have to do that anyway, since independent projects should not influence each other. I can also easily diff, whether I have write access or not (in svn, even simpler so than in CVS). There is no easy way to undo parts of the changes, that's true. > * Peer-level sharing of changes, for testing or evaluation, is > easy and doesn't clutter up the central server with short-lived > branches. So how does that work? If I commit the changes to my local version of the repository, how do they get peer-level-shared? I turn off my machine when I leave the house, and I don't have a permanent IP, anyway, to host a web server or some such. > * Speculative branching: it is cheap to create a local private > branch that contains some half-baked changes. If they work out, > fold them back and commit them to the main repository. If not, > blow the branch away and forget about it. I do that with separate sandboxes right now. cp -a py2.5 py-64bit gives me a new sandbox, in which I can do my speculative project. > Regardless of what you may think of the Linux development model, it is > teling that there have been about 80 people able to commit changes to > Python since 1990 (I just checked the cvsroot tarball), whereas my > estimate is that about ten times as many used BitKeeper to contribute > changes to the Linux kernel just since the 2.5 tree began in 2002. (The > total number of users who contributed changes was about 1600, 1300 of > whom used BK, while the remainder emailed plain old patches that someone > applied.) Hmm. The changes of these 800 people had to be approved by some core developers, or perhaps even all approved by Linus Torvalds, right? This is really the same for Python: A partial list of contributors is in Misc/ACKS (663 lines at the moment), and this doesn't list all the people who contributed trivial changes. So I guess Python has the same number of contributors per line as the Linux kernel. > It is, of course, not possible for me to tell which CVS commits were > really patches that originated with someone else, but my intent is to > show how the choice of tools affects the ability of people to contribute > in "natural" ways. I hear that, but I have a hard time believing it. People find the "cvs diff -u, send diff file for discussion to patches tracker" cycle quite natural. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
