Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Jason Earl <jearl@xmission.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     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/
>
> That is good.
>
> Can you explain what that URL means?  Does the URL identify a
> specific revision?  Or does the URL identify a repository?  If it
> identifies a repository, how does git decide which revision to get?

The above command would create a copy of the entire git master
repository on your machine.  It holds all of the revisions that have
ever been pushed to that particular repository.  However, by default
it does the right thing and checks out the tip of the master branch
from that repository.  In other words, it is no more difficult to
follow the main trunk of the canonical repository with git than it is
with CVS.

The primary difference is that with a dVCS you can do quite a few
tricks that you can't do with CVS.

Jason