Re: [xmlvm-users] Adding new committers

[Panayotis K. <pan...@pa...>]

On Jan 11, 2011, at 12:48 AM, Paul Poley wrote:

> You can do the same thing with subversion.  It's quite easy to make branches & merge with it as well.  I'm not familiar with Mercurial/GIT, but I'm assuming it's just a matter of who's familiar with what.  I'm not directing this at you.  Rather, you could say this about me & Mercurial/GIT, but to steal a rather famous quote:
> "You always fear what you don't understand"
> 
> Yes, you can do automatic merging with subversion too, but that misses the point.  Each merge described is a purposeful human decision or we would forget about the branches.  If we think that's too much trouble or too complicated, we don't have to do branching or tagging, but I'm trying to keep quality code separated.  Just because someone wrote some code doesn't mean it's worthy of trunk (myself included).
> 
> So to reiterate, my thoughts are just discussion.  Please feel free to give input or critique.  If you have ideas/comments on Mercurial/GIT, please do share.


I am just talking after my own experiences.
I've used SVN for a long time and I was too reluctant to move on to mercurial. But there were real advantages on using mercurial instead of SVN.

What SVN actually does with branches is to copy the whole directory structure over and over again. To drop a branch or merge two branches was (in my experience) a nightmare, especially if 3-way merge was required (i.e. changes were performed on the same block of code). Moreover, other resources like binaries or files moving around were implemented by a non-optimized way; not to mention the time and internet requirements in the case someone wants to go from one version to another. Even worse, moving from one branch to another was practically moving from one project to another with nothing in common.
All these problems made the whole procedure slow, bulky and not really user friendly. 

Distributed versioning systems have proved to solve these problems in an elegant manner. I've chosen mercurial, but this doesn't matter - any one is good.
I can only say that when I went to mercurial, I couldn't go back. I've actually used a lot mercurial during the last months with XMLVM. I've created monster patches, when at the same time official XMLVM tree moved along, and resolved all merges with success. I am convinced that, without the help of mercurial this continuous merging and developing would not have been possible.