Re: Design by Community

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:10 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> 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.

  That's not entirely helpful.  First, you still have to master CVS to
commit.  We'd end up using two different CLIs for the same thing.  Also,
bazaar.ubuntu.com contains archives in the old bazaar 1.x format, while
they recommend bazaar-NG now (bzr).  Finally, the archive only mirrors a
few (24) GNOME modules, not the entire CVS tree.

>   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...

  Well, then at least mercurial or bzr; they at least are not
over-complicated from my experience.  I can't comment on git since I
never used it.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.