Re: Switching to Subversion

[Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:

> Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de> writes:
>> I have to plug mercurial[0] in this thread.  It's a distributed SCM
>> written in python, which has a ui which is very similar to cvs, too
>> (at least for all operation where this is possible).  
>
> Here's Keith Packard's (of X11 fame) rather well-argued take on the
> issue:
>
>    http://keithp.com/blog/Repository_Formats_Matter.html
>
> He provides pretty good arguments _against_ subversion, but also
> addresses mercurial vs. git a bit (mercurial is in some sense a riff on
> git, btw).

While I'm not to happy with the kind of argumentation he uses against
SVN, I do strongly agree with his point that offline capabilities are
a great win.

One big obstacle with git (which he mentions, too) is the
user interface.  With a project like Emacs I think its rather
essential, that the SCM is easy to use for developers, and most
developers are used to CVS.  Mercurial is designed to be very
approachable to people knowing CVS.

Another interesting point is performance, experience shows that
mercurial is not slower than git, in fact, there are certain
situations where mercurial is way faster.  And when it comes to usage
of resources (RAM, disk space) mercurial is (sometimes _much_) more
efficient, too. -- Sorry for sounding a bit like a commercial, but I
was quite skeptical my self until Thomas (I CCed him) convinced me to
actually try it, and now I'm really a fan...  ;-)

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde : VI is to EMACS as masturbation is to making love:
             : effective and always available but probably not your
             : first choice...