On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 4:54 PM, John Cliff <john.cliff@...400...> wrote:
Bzr was a big part of me pretty much giving up trying with the main codebase. Last few times I found some spare time to try I just spent an entire evening getting pissed at how difficult something that should be trivial was being made by a bad tool. Slow, unreliable, and fairly incomprehensible.
After some experience with other projects using distributed VCSes, I am now of the opinion that in many cases, they cost more than they can bring benefits. Especially if a project has, or intends to attract, inexperienced developers, a distributed VCS becomes a burden: it is much harder to figure out and, critically, much easier to screw up. Yes, you can screw up with SVN as well ("svn resolved" and all that), but it is rare - you need to conflict with someone in exactly the same place of the same file for this to happen; in Bazaar or Mercurial unintended conflicts often become the norm rather than an exception ("oh no I forgot to update before push, again!", "why does it refuse to push?" "where are my changes?" "why won't it merge?" "how to fix the multiple heads I created again?" etc. etc.) This is all learnable, but not before much hair is pulled.
Distributed VCSes have their place in projects where a lot of forking and merging happens, or where all developers are comfortable with that model and newbies are not welcome (such as Linux kernel). But Inkscape is not like that at all - it has traditionally preferred gradual in-the-trunk reworking rather than branches even for complex refactorings, and while it is complex it has a lot of places that are newbie-hackable to great benefit and with little danger (such as filters).
SVN with its intuitive simplicity is like Wiki. Much of the success of Wikipedia is due to the simplicity of the Wiki interface for editing. Now they are making it gradually more complex, e.g. with "patrolled" or "flagged" revisions that limit the fundamental edit/view immediacy. They have good reasons for that I'm sure, but it's also clear that if it were like that from the beginning, Wikipedia wouldn't have experienced the explosive growth of its first years.