[slime-devel] Re: Mercurial

Steve Morin steve.morin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 6 01:26:57 UTC 2008


On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 4:51 PM, David Brown <lisp at davidb.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:24:42AM -0800, Steve Morin wrote:
>
> >I have worked on branches in cvs svn and perforce.  I don't know so
> please
> >educate me how do these other version control systems make a marked
> >improvement in branching and distributed development?
>
> They're all broken in different ways, but it all boils down to not storing
> enough metadata with the branch/merges.  CVS and Perforce share in that
> they track files individually, not directories.  This breaks down when
> there are renames and such in one branch.  SVN doesn't store merge
> history,
> so has to be told what might be a common ancestor for a merge.
>

I agree with you here.  For just about everyone merging is always a
frustrating process.  Currently I am working on a project with svn where I
have to merge with 3 seperate branches and trunk not fun.   This I don't
know much about other techniques but, here I would need the ability to make
a change in one branch and apply it to the two other branches and trunk.
This needs to be very flexible.


> None of them do distributed development, they only let other developers
> connect remotely.  Each still checks out and checks into a single repo.  A
> distributed system allows me to create my own branches without even
> needing
> write permission on a central repo.
>

> Without using and understanding a distributed revision control system,
> it's
> hard to understand why it is so much more powerful and useful.  It is
> really a much better way of working.


I have done to a couple presentations on Mecurial but If people are working
on a common project  I am not sure there is a usual need to create your own
branch.  If I am doing work I am not sharing with others I get my own copy
or setup my own repository.  Otherwise I am usually commiting to the main
project, and work the with project maintainer for a branch if it's a serious
effort that needs that or else you for the project if you can't see eye to
eye with the "establishment"

>
> We use Perforce at my work.  Most of us on my team use a Perforce->git
> gateway to be able to do useful tracking and distributed development.
>
> David
>
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