Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Jason Earl <jearl@xmission.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     "the current development version" is not a concept for git.  No
>     repository is special as far as git is concerned.  The "current
>     development version" is a social, not a technical concept.  For example,
>     the git maintainer was off-line unexpectedly for some months recently.
>     Somebody else took over seamlessly by collecting, arranging and
>     coordinating patches on the git list into _his_ repository.
>
> With CVS, people can get the current version of every program on
> savannah in a uniform way.  What you say seems to imply that that is
> not possible with git.  That seems like a big step backwards.

A distributed VCS can be used just like CVS.  The fans of distributed
VCS systems like to talk about the many benefits of a distributed
system, but I don't know of a single major project that uses a dVCS
that doesn't have a canonical URL.  For example, if you wanted to
start hacking on git (assuming you had a copy of git installed
already) you could do:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

If you wanted to hack on mercurial and you had a mercurial client
installed you would use this command:

hg clone http://selenic.com/hg/

All of the improvements to git (or mercurial) that are likely to
become part of a release eventually end up in the default branch in
much the same way that all of the improvements that are likely to end
up in a release of emacs get put into CVS.  The difference is that
dVCSes like git allow for a much more flexible workflow (especially
for people that spend a lot of time disconnected).

> Within a community of people that work together, it won't be a
> problem.  They will know to look THERE instead of HERE.  But users
> in general can't be expected to check for that sort of thing before
> they get the current development Emacs.

Folks that like distributed version control systems (and that includes
basically everyone that has tried one) like to point out that if
something happened to the canonical URL work could continue on without
it until things were sorted out.  That doesn't mean, however, that you
have to do without the canonical URL.  It simply means that you
*could* do without the canonical URL in a pinch.

If CVS is down, you are finished until things get sorted out.  With a
distributed system the failure of one branch isn't more than a minor
annoyance.