Subject: Re: VCS comparison table

From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 11:34:58 -0500

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 08:58:56AM -0700 I heard the voice of
David Lang, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> one key difference is that with bzr you have to do this chopping by
> creating the branches at the time changes are done,

HUH?  Why on earth do you think that?

To do this in a git data model, you point at 2 (or 3, or 4, or...)
revisions, anywhere in the revision-space universe.  You derive back a
DAG of the history from each of them by recursing over parent links.
You figure out where (if anywhere) those DAG's intersect.  And based
on that, you alter what and how you display; including or excluding
certain revs, changing the angles of lines or columnation of dots in a
graph, etc.

To do it in a bzr data model, you would follow *EXACTLY* the same
steps.  As in, you do EXACTLY (a), then EXACTLY (b), then...

> what people are saying is that it doesn't easily support a truely
> distributed workflow. this is a very different statement.

And it's one that carries around a lot of unstated assumptions about
what "truely distributed" means, which *I*'m certainly not
understanding, because any meaning I can apply to the term doesn't
lead me to the conclusions it does you.  Certainly, depending on your
workflow, certain parts of the UI are of lesser utility than they are
in mine, down to and including zero.  And it's probably certain that
some parts of the UI aren't up to handling various workflows, too,
including OUR workflow.  That's kinda what "in development" means...

But that's a very different statement from the claim that they CAN'T
be without changes to the conceptual model underneath.  Just because a
UI is built around maintaining the fiction of a mainline doesn't mean
the system requires it.  All you'd have to do to abandon it is write a
different log formatter that didn't show revnos and didn't nest merge
commits, and change (or add an option to) 'merge' to fast-forward if
possible.  The difference between the views on how the pieces should
fit together really IS just that fine.

-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  [email-masked]
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.