Re: Design by Community

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 14:20 +0000, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
>   I know some very wise people have decided, apparently without much
> discussion with the community, that GNOME would switch to Subversion.
> But I keep thinking that, although Subversion is much better than CVS,
> maybe we would benefit more from a distributed version control system,
> like mercurial, bzr, git, monotone, etc.

I've seen lots of discussion about Subversion vs Arch vs Bazaar (in
various forms) on gnome-hackers.

>   I keep wondering whether the decision to switch to Subversion is due
> to the large number of similar looking alternatives and lack of courage
> from the GNOME leadership to pick one, while in the centralized version
> control systems Subversion is becoming _the_ alternative to CVS, so it's
> easier to pick Subversion rather than _choose_ one of the distributed
> control systems.

Correct. Subversion means that existing developers can pick it up in no
time, so from a developer PoV its a pretty painless operations
(obviously from the cvs admin PoV its trickier, but not as hard as
migrating to arch and training all developers).

As was bought up in the original thread on this topic, bazaar.ubuntu.com
contains daily-synced Bazaar archives of the GNOME CVS modules, so if
you want to do a remote branch of a module to hack on it, you can.  I
did the ICC work on Eye Of Gnome this way, and it was very useful.  Yes,
it has drawbacks, but without forcing everyone to learn an completely
new tool, migrating to svn and providing bazaar mirrors covers pretty
much all cases.

>   There's a very interesting thread in the cairo list regarding a
> potential switch from CVS to git.  I commend Carl Worth for the courage
> of proposing this; maybe the GNOME project should take cue from him.

I know kernel developers that think git is over-complicated and
confusing...

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross burtonini com
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                                     www: http://www.burtonini.com./
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