[svlug] Preventing a Revision Control Flamewar

[Alan DuBoff]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> It falls flat for people who don't live and develop in a 
> distributed environment. The companies I've worked for have 
> used Mercurial, and we use it in a centralized fashion, 
> because that's how our business is organized. It's funny that 
> most DVCS devotees can't comprehend that such users exist.
>
> We do use some of the DVCSness of Mercurial. But we use a push 
> model to a central repo, while most really distributed 
> projects use a pull model.

But I use Mercurial like that also, it has nothing to do with 
pushing to a centralized repository, it has more to do with how 
the development is done.

In a distributed environment you can do development and make 
changes to the code that resides in said centralized repository, 
without effecting anyone else as it is on your local system 
which was clone'd from the centralized repository. Others can 
merge your changes in with their workspace to review and test, 
before it is pushed to said centralized repository.

If your not using this functionaltiy of a distributed system, 
yet you are using a distributed system (i.e., Mercurial), you 
are missing out on one of the biggest benifits of using a 
distributed system to begin with. All of our mileage varies.

It is this point in how distributed systems work which Linus was 
making a point of. I also agree with him. If you know that you 
are working in a distributed environment, no sense in continuing 
on with a centralized repository, and I believe that was his 
point with svn.

He uses cvs as an example, for a miserable merge. git, hg, and 
other distributed version control systems shine with merging 
code, that is how they manage a distributed environment.

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration