Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

[James Livingston <doctau mac com>]

As I haven't really contributed anything to GNOME in a year or so,  
I've been keeping out of the debate, but:

On 07/01/2009, at 9:00 AM, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> Welcome to the open source world.  Generally open source developers  
> are
> not limited to GNOME, and they eventually learn 2-3 revision control
> systems.  I mean, they don't need to learn a lot of commands of each
> RCS, just the basics:
>
>  1- Checkout/clone module;
>  2- Update;
>  3- Create a diff of changes, redirecting to a patch file.

I also agree that many contributors do those tasks (especially non- 
coders like translators), and it would be fairly simple to have a  
small script that does those tasks for all the SCMs that GNOME hosted  
if it chose to host multiple SCMs. Something like "gnome-scm checkout  
git:http://host.xz/path/to/repo.git/>", "gnome-scm checkout bzr:http://bzr-project.example.com/foo.stable/ 
", "gnome-scm update" and "gnome-scm diff" would be a good start.

This obviously wouldn't do anything fancy, but for all the people who  
don't have about SCMs and just want to make a small change it would  
work. Since it would presumably delegate actual work to the underlying  
SCM tools, it would also be an easy transition for anyone who wanted  
to start doing more powerful things, by allowing them to use the real  
tools on their checkout.


If GNOME hosted multiple SCMs then it would mean that developers who  
work on a large number of projects might have to learn both git and  
bzr. Which I can't see as a huge issues because anything they maintain  
will be presumably in their favourite SCM, anything they only do a  
small amount of work on will only require the basics on the SCM, and  
anyone who does serious work on multiple projects probably won't have  
a problem learning another SCM. Is knowing both git and bzr a huge  
issue? I imagine that most serious developers here already know quite  
a few, at least CVS, SVN, Git/BZR and probably others.


James (who is ducking back outside the flamethrowing-testing area)