On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:19 AM, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> You can then offer a non-source-control means of downloading that >> specific revision. > > Just keep in mind the downside that you can't then > push or pull your changes directly back into the main > repository. You can generate a patch file for the > project maintainer to apply, however. Hg makes it > very easy to produce a patch file between any two > revisions.
Yes, but a lot of people just want to get the software, they don't actually need to generate patch files :) > Also, unless the project is truly ancient, the > whole history might not be as big as you expect. > The code presumably grew to its present size > incrementally, in an approximately monotonic > manner, so the sum of all the diffs is probably > about the same order of magnitude as the current > code size. > > As an experiment, I just cloned a copy of the > CPython repository, and it's about 300MB. A > tarball of Python 3.2 that I downloaded and > compiled earlier is about 75MB. That's a ratio > of about 4, and CPython is a pretty ancient > project! Yep! But cloning requires that you have Mercurial installed and, more importantly, know how to use it. We don't have a huge proliferation of source control systems these days, but if someone says "Our code is available via Perforce", I'm going to just look for a tarball download, rather than figure out a source control system I don't know. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
