[mnet-devel] Subversion vs DARCS

[Jim McCoy]

I am going to leave most of the DARCS vs. Subversion discussion aside 
as not really worth wasting time on right now (but I will point out 
that the lack of Windows support in DARCS is somewhat critical for us) 
and dial in to what I think is the key thing to be considered here...

On Sunday, July 6, 2003, at 08:00 AM, Zooko wrote:
[...]
>
> Our current needs for sophisticated branching and merging are high.

Why?  I think that this is the symptom of a problem and not a reason 
for wasting cycles looking for a solution that gives us more rope with 
which to hang ourselves.  Zooko presents the situation of multiple 
disruptive changes being worked on at the same time and a desire to 
merge these branches.  I would suggest that the problem is not that the 
tool makes this hard, but that multiple disruptive branches are being 
co-developed.  This is what led to the current problems.  It was not 
that CVS did not handle the problem gracefully, but rather that the 
system allowed the merges to happen in the first place.

Under the hypothetical example given, lets assume a branch_ent, a 
branch_twisted (any branch_HC changes will be our problem to integrate 
if we want to push them back in to mnet.)  I think that rather than 
trying to let the tool solve the coordination problems for us it is 
incumbent upon the developers to actually talk to each other and decide 
which branch should be given primacy. I can't see any reason for a 
branch that is not backwards compatible with the current HEAD unless 
everyone agrees on the necessity of the change.  Keep disruptive 
changes to small manageable chunks so that you can actually isolate the 
change when it is being merged back in to the main branch. If this 
means taping the name of the branch you are working on to the wall, so 
be it.

For example, how much time would be saved in these rare cases of 
multiple-disruption branching compared to the amount of time that we 
have already wasted discussing the issue?  (Only half-joking here...)

Jim



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