[Click] distributed source control

[Brendan Cully]

On Friday, 06 July 2007 at 10:47, Bart Braem wrote:
> On Thursday 05 July 2007 19:46, Eddie Kohler wrote:
> > I would like to move away from Click's current anonymous CVS based
> > development model to a distributed source control system.  This would
> > let people maintain public branches of their own.  I am leaning towards
> > "git", the tool originally developed for Linux.
> >
> > http://git.or.cz/
> >
> > Any complaints or comments?  Speak now!
> 
> Hi Eddie,
> 
> Can I ask why you want a distributed system?  I really like the idea
> of moving away from CVS, the advantages of using it are starting to
> fade quickly, compared to other solutions available today.  But I
> don't like the idea of using a distributed system. Of course the
> advantage is that separate people can use their own
> repositories. But then the integration with the Click "core" will
> get harder when API changes are made. Repository owners will have to
> indicate compatible Click versions, I'd think.

Nothing requires this. DVCS is a superset of VCS, and you can continue
to use it in a centralized way, with one master repository at an
official location. Even when used this way, a DVCS lets you do cool
things like offline commits, and diff/patch/log/annotate etc are much
faster. And you'd still get big improvements in branch merging, which
is no fun in subversion.

> But I might be too old-fashioned here, does anyone have experience with 
> synchronization of source repositories? Does this work, is it hard to keep up 
> with the core repository?

since it's so much easier to move code across branches, I'd say it
should be a lot easier. And if you just want to track the official
repository, that's nearly automatic. Just pull and merge (again, merge
is not the scary operation it is in subversion).

> Currently for some internal projects we are using SVN and combined with 
> TortoiseSVN even newbies can perfectly use it. But perhaps access permissions 
> will be harder to manage than in distributed systems.
> 
> A second remark: please consider something more usable than git. To me it 
> seemed really hard to use, last time I tried to use it. 
> I do not know whether mercurial or svk or ... are more userfriendly, but I 
> feel that we should avoid building a barrier for people to use the latest and 
> greatest Click release.

The mercurial interface looks very similar to subversion. You have a
couple more operations (pull, push, merge), but it should be very easy
to adapt to.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/click/attachments/20070706/06e1ec25/attachment.pgp