[mnet-devel] Subversion vs DARCS

[Zooko]

> > Our current needs for sophisticated branching and merging are high.
> 
> Why?  [...]

A better tool is no substitute for good practice, of course, but it is still a 
better tool.

I'm interested in implementing disruptive changes.  I'm also interested in 
maintaining a stable and monotonically improving version of Mnet for hackers 
and users.  I cannot achieve these two goals without using branching of some 
sort or another [*].

Since much of The Crisis went on solely through the transient and obscure 
medium of IRC, some people might not be aware that the *original* problem 
wasn't that we merged an incomplete ent implementation onto HEAD, the original 
problem was that people were dissatisfied with having the ent development on a 
separate branch (the "branch_newnet" branch).

Therefore we all unanimously decided to merge branch_newnet onto HEAD even 
though we all knew this would break HEAD.

Then we suffered the consequences.  Things might have been better if I had 
then worked diligently at fixing ent ASAP instead of taking several weeks off, 
first to play games with my brothers, then to work for money.

I hope that a better tool makes branch management easy enough that people 
don't mind when significant development happens on non-HEAD branches.

Besides which, I like learning about how new tools work and how to use them.

But of course, no tool will help if we don't communicate well about our 
respective plans.

Regards,

Zooko

http://zooko.com/
         ^-- under re-construction: some new stuff, some broken links

[*] The simplest form of branching, of course, is to do all the disruptive 
    work in my sandbox and then CVS commit it once it is good enough to 
    monotonically improve HEAD.  This isn't bad, but it makes it hard for more 
    than once person to work on the disruptive change at a time, and it 
    doesn't offer revision control for the disruptive work until it is ready 
    to commit.



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