Subject: Re: An interesting opinion on DVCS/git

From: Sitaram Chamarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 08:55:25 +0530

On 03/04/2015 08:55 PM, Michael J Gruber wrote:

> Yes, that article has a few really weak lines of arguments, such as the
> tutorial count.

Here's his definition of the main draw of a DVCS:

    No, the only thing that a DVCS gets you, by definition, is that
    everyone gets a copy of the full offline history of the entire
    repository to do with as you please.

That completely misses the point.  What about committing while offline,
'git blame' months-old changes offline, or local branches that don't
have to make it to the server until they have cooked for a while, and so
on and on?

We're not all "facebooks" with multi-GB repos, and I certainly don't
care as much about disk space or bandwidth if losing those features is
the cost.

It gets worse:

    Let me tell you something. Of all the time I have ever used DVCSes,
    over the last twenty years if we count Smalltalk changesets and
    twelve or so if you don’t, I have wanted to have the full history
    while offline a grand total of maybe about six times.

I don't know how you can work on anything reasonably complex and
multi-developer without using some of those features six times in a
*week* (sometimes, six times in a *weekend*) let alone 12 years.