# from Bryce Harrington # on Tuesday 27 February 2007 01:51 pm:
Version control system: Mental has been experimenting with git and trying to get it to operate with svn. This study is still very early on, but if it works out well, one day we may begin encouraging developers to use git.
It looks like this discussion got started regarding the difficulty of maintaining a branch for Cairo work. I'm not sure you really need distributed version control just for that. IME, branching in svn isn't that painful, but I guess if you're trying to constantly merge-down from trunk it could be.
It's my impression that we're only talking about a single branch for one monolithic development iteration. To me, that sounds like svn. If I'm mistaken and the plan is to have multiple competing/cooperating branches ala kernel, then yes, darcs/mercurial/git make more sense. However, IME anything distributed is going to have some friction with svn's linear central model.
If you just want better merge tools for svn, look at svk. With that approach, you keep the linear central model, but with a local buffer and easier branching/merging.
just my $0.02.
--Eric