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Re: Distributed Subversion

From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:45:39 -0500

Marko Käning wrote:
>> Distributed VCS's can let you avoid network issues by working in isolation,
>> but if your real goal is to allow a number of distributed team members to take
>> advantage of each others updates as they are made you are going to have to
>> deal with the network transfers anyway - and depending on the nature of the
>> project you may really want a central authoritative repository.
>
> If you at times simply have to work in isolation it's always better to be
> able to commit your own changes into your own clone. Once you're back
> online you can push your changes (also bundled together) back into the
> main repository.

It just seems rare these days to not have network access for any length
of time. And I usually consider being able to get other's updates at
least equally important as being able to commit.

> So, using a DVCS doesn't necessarily mean that you won't
> have a central repository, but it gives you more freedom to commit your
> work without the need to have access to the central repo.

But that's only half of the problem when a team is working together.

> This feature is
> what I always missed in SVN. SVN is "only" a better CVS. I think the
> future lies in DVCS, technology simply has moved on, faster than many
> thought. (See Chia-liang Kao's post on "The Future of SVK" on SVK's
> mailing list!)

The big problem is that the GUI tools don't match. What we really need
is a standardized API-level interface or a rest-full wrapper for
different version control systems.

> That said, to avoid a flame war, which I did not mean to initiate with
> my post, I want to point out that my repos are currently hosted like this:
>
> CVS: 40% (still around due to compactness and speed)
> SVN: 50% :)
> Hg : 10% (some projects which need off-line access)
>
> which is not likely to change in the near future due to good experiences
> with all three of them. (Could be that git will come into play soon.)

What happens when people working in isolation with DVCS make large
conflicting changes before the code ends up in the same place?

--
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell_at_gmail.com
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Received on 2009-06-10 14:46:57 CEST

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