Subject: Re: Subversion developer: svn is for dumb people

From: Pierre Habouzit <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:34:47 +0200

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 02:25:36PM +0000, Steven Grimm wrote:
> Thought folks here might get a kick out of this:
> 
> http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=79
> 
> Okay, my summary is slightly facetious, but that's basically the gist of 
> what he's saying: you should choose Subversion rather than a DVCS because 
> most of your users won't be smart enough to use the better tool.
> 
> I can't say he's completely wrong, especially about the 20/80% idea 
> (though I think "20%" is generous), but some of his specific arguments 
> about DVCS are on the bogus side. "Centralized systems encourage code 
> reviews," for one -- I challenge him to find a project with a more 
> pervasive and effective code-reviewing culture than the git project.

  Your argument is also bogus.

  IMNSHO, peer reviewing has nothing to do with git, svn, or $SCM. It's
a social pattern. There are people that do it because they understand
it's a good and necessary sound thing to do, and there are the others.
Guess what, it has a lot to do with the 20%/80% line (that I would have
more described as the 2/98 but well…).

  Put git into the hands of fools, they won't proofread their code more
or less than with svn. And they will shoot themselves into their foots
twice as often as with svn.

  Though, for people that are able to deal with git and use it, git
allows way better code reviewing patterns than with svn, because you
can prepare a nice incremental branch that adds each new features you
worked on with small patches (see my parse-options series). With svn,
you can't do that, because there is no tool that allow you to record
those patches on your end, so you submit a big +4123/-2341 patch. That
makes peer reviewing really harder.

  Of course the git community is a perfect example of how code should be
reviewed. But it's not because we use git, it's because we definitely
are in the "20%".

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                [email-masked]
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org