Re: collaborating

In a message dated: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 23:05:34 +0200
Sebastien Cevey said:

>On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 04:42:25PM -0400, Paul Lussier wrote:
>
>OK I am kinda new too, since I read but hardly spoke. :)
>
>> CVS is good, subversion when finished, will be better. However,
>> BitKeeper has some great features that nothing else I know of has,
>> commercial or otherwise! It would be great to have a free
>> BitKeeper.
>
>OK I might have missed the point in the previous mails, and I know
>this is not precisely the topic here, but what exactly does BK have
>that is not planned / impossible in Subversion ? Or, possibly, what
>does svn have that BK doesn't ?

BK has some pretty good graphical tools which let you browse through
the repository and view different changesets, etc.

The one feature I thought was by far the coolest was it's idea of
complete decentralization. IOW, I can clone the "main" repository to
my laptop and check the code in and out from the clone on *my*
system, then later, when I have my network connection back, merge my
local clone back with "main" repository.

Additionally, if I have a cloned repository on my local system,
someone else can come along and check it out from me, inheriting all
my changes.

But I think the aspect I like most about this feature, is the
revision control within concept. IOW, I can clone the master
repository, then check in and out against that as I make changes to
the source. So if I realize at some point that I screwed up
somewhere, I can go back and check out that certain rev.

This feature is something I would have loved to have had in a
ClearCase environment a few years ago. Everyone was developing
against the main line and would keep files checked out for months.
One guy had a bad habit of "accidently" rm'ing his tree. (of course,
the development process these people used was inherently broken, but
I had no power to fix that particular problem). Restoring his data
was virtually impossible because of the way CC stores data within
it's "views", and checking back out from the VOB would only get him
the files he had originally checked out 3 months ago, losing him 3
months worth of work.

If he had done something as simple as used rcs within clearcase,
everything would have been fine. When I saw that BK essentially allows
for exactly that type of behavior I almost cried :) Now, I'm not
saying BK is the best there is, or that it's flawless, just that one
feature is something I've never heard of anywhere else, and I see it
as being a potentially huge benefit to a lot of people, and I don't
see that svn has that on the roadmap either, since at this point, svn,
being simply a better CVS, is inherently a centralized system.
Maybe this is something that can be changed in the 2.0 track?

-- 
Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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