Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

["John Carr" <john carr unrouted co uk>]

>> Anyway, I'd rather add John Carr to the sysadmin team. I plan to make a
>> proposal to switch GNOME to a DVCS where Git works using Johns
>> suggestion. Then other sysadmins[1] can suggest whatever proposal they
>> want. These proposals can be investigated on merit and then a one can be
>> chosen (chosen as in: "go ahead and try if this would work", not "go
>> ahead blindly"; everything must be tested before a cutover).
>
> John's idea is a good one but it patently loses on technical merit. As
> stated by John here, git will only be support in a degraded,
> bastardized form because he chose bzr as the repository format:
>
> http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/12/11/dvcs-for-gnome/#comment-172
>
> Are we really going to go back to the days of CVS where file moves
> aren't supported?

A git move operation is simply git rm && git add. By that reckoning
i'd either not be able to represent any deletes or any adds because of
that god damn impaired Bzr file format! Wow, i'd be so eager to share
that idea with the community ;)

The big deal here is that git uses a heuristic to say Foo is now
called Bar (selectively; its not done for speed in some cases). This
is not stored anywhere in the file format, git redetermines it (if it
wouldnt be too slow to do so). In Bazaar, its stored in the file
format. This means merge doesnt have to consider ancestry to know if 2
files are related, it just knows they are. Solution? We simply have to
run that heuristic ourselves so that Bazaar knows 2 files are related
at import time.

Git support is not degraded here, and Bazaar is no worse off than if
you had imported a Git project into Bazaar for the first time
(basically merge will work, but won't work *as* well in the rename
case).

I'm not a complete idiot - if it was going to be a "degraded,
bastardized form" of Git I wouldn't waste my time on it. I suppose I
might be an evil genius stalling for "Bazaar DS9" to be written (sorry
for the very bad joke that probably only i get...).

> It strikes me that this very vocal minority--John and Robert Carr,
> Karl Lattimer and Rob Taylor (whom are four of the six people I
> mentioned above)--are potentially delaying even longer what we've
> wanted for more than two years, now. It is from these same people that
> came the suggestion that git users were a rapid, vocal minority. Why
> are we letting them derail this process?

This is not my 1st reply. The first one was fully of angry cow >:().
Please dont single people out. I'm happy to have a hand wavy
discussion with you 1st person, IRL especially so. Also, KL and RT are
innocent.

As bkor has stated, there are lots of Git users so any implementation
will support you, and support you well. That is a requirement. So any
talk of my idea is not Git vs Bazaar, its talk of one way we can move
forward. So i dont consider it to be derailing. When mentioning my
idea, lets stick to technical problems with it rather than trying to
undermine anyone who has looked at it and thinks it is sound and
doable.

John