On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 10:51:42AM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le jeudi 21 février 2008 à 23:31 -0600, John Goerzen a écrit : > > > 1) Large projects using $DVCS and making it easy for people that aren't > > familiar with $DVCS to learn how to participate in that project. > > How is this relevant to the bug issue? I have the impression that DVCS > fanboys are trying to bring them in all discussions. > It is completetly relevant. I know that for me, when I see a package using something than CVS or Subversion as it development repository, my desire to checkout the latest code and contribute drops significantly. I'm all for adopting the latest and greatest. However, the latest and greatest also means that there are fewer people familiar it, or even willing to with it. Now, if I could run an 'apt-get source -t unstable foo' and create my patch against the resulting source package, and be sure that the maintainer won't reject it on the grounds of the patch not being against the head (or latest, or whatever) of whichever $DVCS they happen to be using, then things would be a little better. Of course, for huge packages, this really is kind of annoying, since every time a new package upload occurs you must at least re-download the .diff.gz (which can be upwards of 20 or 30 MB for large packages), to say nothing of downloading a massive .orig.tar.gz whenever it changes. The point is that $DVCS presents an added barrier to entry. You would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know how to checkout from CVS, make some changes, create a diff and submit it (and by extension Subversion, since they are functionally identical in that respect). The same cannot be said of all the incarnations of distributed version control systems (and even some of the newer ones that follow a more traditional model). Now, not everyone likes CVS or Subversion, but most everyone is conversant enough with them that the tools don't present an added barrier to entry. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature