Re: Proposal for collaborative maintenance of packages
On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> > In other words, a distributed VCS allows all parties to manage their own
> > repositories equally, and the project can nominate one of them the
> > "official" central repository, without impacting everyone's ability to
> > communicate changes between other repositories.
>
> This may not be the most popular opinion, particularly among fans of
> distributed VCSes (and I do understand the merits), but wrapping your mind
> around the distributed model isn't easy. I can explain to sysadmins who
> have never used a VCS before but who have compiled software and can work
> on Debian packages how to use Subversion, but explaining bzr feels rather
> intimidating.
" You have a central entity, be it a person (the project leader for example)
or a bot, which has write access to the main repository. Everyone sends
commits (working changesets) to this person/bot, for them to get merged to
the main repository. Everyone has a local read-only copy of the main
repository that they can use even while offline (which they sync to the main
repository every now and then). Everyone has a local read-write repository
that they use for ongoing work, even while offline. It is this work that,
when deemed ready, is sent as a changeset for inclusion in the main
repository. "
What IS difficult about it? It is exactly how the Linux kernel is managed,
only they have various layers of "project leaders" and no bots. Nobody in
the system administrator, development or operation areas where I work would
have too much difficulty grasping the basic idea, and it wouldn't take much
time to explain the specifics (repository mirrors, etc).
Whatever the issues of svn versus bzr are, difficulty of grasping the bzr
way of doing things shouldn't be one of them.
Since bzr (and other arch derivates) have the benefit of NEVER forgeting
which changesets are in a tree, I prefer them over any other distributed
system. If anyone knows of other distributed system that saw the light and
implemented this, please let me know.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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