Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)

["Sanford Armstrong" <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On 9/8/07, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> <quote who="Sanford Armstrong">
>
> > I simply meant that less people are familiar with D-SCM tools and that
> > they are somewhat harder for a newbie to learn than C-SCM tools.
>
> This is an unfortunate cultural relic created by arch/tla, and hilariously
> promulgated by git. Sure, fewer people are familiar with them, but the good
> ones are not harder to learn.

I'm not really talking about the UI of the D-SCM tool, but about some
fundamentals of the distributed model.  Getting code and pushing code
seems to always require an additonal step.  Users have to learn about
branching and merging up front, whereas in SVN this would come later
in their education.  If I were a newbie developer I would find this
confusing.  As I've stated, I don't have much experience with D-SCM,
but these are the instructions to get started hacking on one project
using bzr...

$ bzr init-repo --trees some-project
$ cd some-project
$ bzr checkout http://url/to/some-project
$ bzr branch mainline working
$ cd working
$ ./configure
$ make

...compared to the same steps using svn...

$ svn co http://url/to/some-project/trunk some-project
$ cd some-project
$ ./configure
$ make

There's just a higher cognitive investment for a newbie getting
started with D-SCM.  As bzr/git/etc become more common in the FLOSS
communities, this won't be as much of an issue, though.  And the
advantages of the distributed model have been well covered here.  :-)

Sandy