Hi,
Jan Kiszka wrote:
Panagiotis Issaris wrote:
So, because of the lack of a good VCS featuring distributed branches, I'm also using Subversion...
I'm curious to learn more about the concrete advantages of distributed branches.
You can contribute to a project without needing project server (CVS/Subversion) write-access.
Can you give a typical scenario for it?
Let's say that I wanted to port RTAI to another architecture.
When using CVS, I either need write access to their project server or need to awfully juggle around
with patches. If I don't have write access, I can only check out their code, and hack on that checked-out
code locally. I can't _practically_ use a versioning system for my own porting code. You can only once
in a while do an 'cvs up' to synchronise with their code and fix the possible conflicts. I have tried
to use a local CVS/Subversion server and merge changes from the projects native tree to my local tree,
but this doesn't work. The problem is that you manually have to specify which parts of the tree have
already been merged and which parts haven't.
More advanced version control systems fix both problems.
They provide distributed branch which give the user the possibility to create a branch to a remote
system on his local system. The projects main version control server is not altered by this branch
creation. Thus, I could create a branch on my local system and continue hacking on that branch
while still being able to commit to this local branch whenever I want.
For the second problem, the repeated remerging of the updates of the projects main sourcecodetree,
they provide an advanced merge operation, which knows which parts have already been commited to
your local tree and which patches haven't been committed yet, and thus will only apply the neccessary
patches.
The main project can afterwards pull in these patches from the distributed branches.
I would guess you may need a certain project size to let this feature become important.
I think these features are interesting for many Free Software projects since it makes the process
of hacking on your projects code easier for externals.
As far as I know, the XFree86 project didn't hand out many CVS write accounts -which is understandable-, which caused hackers to become discontent hackers and wanting a fork. I think many projects suffer with the
same problem, they can't hand out write access to everyone, and on the other hand they want to encourage
as many people as possible to work with their code so they might contribute something useful.
With friendly regards, Takis
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Panagiotis Issaris Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Division Production Engineering, Machine Design and Automation Celestijnenlaan 300B [EMAIL PROTECTED] B-3001 Leuven Belgium http://www.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/pma ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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