On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 08:25:51PM -0700, miles wrote:
For us, the big reason for a distributed system is the ability to work off-line (ie on a plane, train, in a cafe, during a boring meeting, etc) and then post up a day or two later.
Yep, this is a huge feature. It's also wonderful when you're working someplace with a flaky wireless network (like a linux conference); you can commit as often as you go, and wait on pushing.
Or to work on something in a more sandbox situation for a few days or weeks and then upload and have it merged in.
Right, I was alluding to this earlier. For people who use the patch tracker as a make-shift sandbox (either because they don't yet have access to version control, or because they're not comfortable committing to mainline directly), this capability is handy.
It means we can ensure everyone has straightforward access to version control, even if we've not yet granted them the keys to mainline.
Meanwhile it makes frequent committing easy which is a good thing. I have tried both hg and bzr and if both were very easy for me to learn, not much effort will be required for most of you. We're now using hg. Of the two, I had read that bzr was really slow in bigger uploads/merges but maybe the Ubuntu guys can speak to that better.
I've talked with some of the bazaar developers about this. Indeed, in the past there were some big performance issues, and git was the better choice. However, this has been receiving a lot of attention and apparently with bzr 0.92 things have seriously improved. I gather bzr is about equivalent to git for most operations that matter.
The bazaar developer emphasized that these days git vs. bzr comparisons need to consider more than just performance. It's beginning to get neck and neck, and (he feels) usability and interface efficiency throws things to bzr's favor pretty solidly. In talking with hard core bzr users, I gather it's the "tool fitting hand" effect, like we see with inkscape - when the tool flows with your hands vs. when you're fighting with it and have to mentally shift focus to operate it; in the latter case you don't care if it performs better, it's still frustrating.
Bryce