Centralized vs Distributed Version Control (was: Re: [Ilugc] Subversion Open House @ CollabNet Chennai)
- From: srsy70@xxxxxxxxx (S.Ramaswamy)
- Date: Sat May 5 13:47:24 2007
Damn, I was trying not to dive back into this thread, but I have to
disagree with you on management issues: *many* projects using Darcs have
a single, central, canonical repository, and distributed branches are
merely for individual developers to hack on.
Why can't you hack in the working copy of a centralized version control system ?
This provides great
freeedom: while hacking on a project like this, I can make changes
willy-nilly in my development branch and not worry about cluttering up
the changelog of the central repository. I can even have my editor
commit the change every time I save to compile or test or lint the code,
without having to worry about the effects of maybe hundreds of commits a
day on the central repository. As I'm going, I get all the advantages of
version control -- mostly being able to inspect the changes on a number
of scales. When I have the code in a stable state, I can package up my
patches and send them as a single change -- perhaps by e-mail, where
appropriate hooks will run a test suite against it before committing it
to the main branch. This sort of model is approached by SVN's
lightweight branching, but it doesn't go far enough and isn't exploited
well enough in the majority of cases.
The bunch of issues mentioned above indicate a failure to either
establish a sane branching policy or understand how branching works.
I am open to using DVCSs, but 'am yet to hear a cogent case made for them.
Ramaswamy
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