AccuRev (was "bazaar/mercurial meeting")

[Jan Hudec]

On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 16:46:20 -0400, John Yates wrote:
> A bunch of unorganized thoughts because I do not have the
> time to write something more polished.

[...]

> It was not hard to follow their technology -- it bears many
> similarities to recent DRCS efforts.  In both my own mind,
> and that of my colleagues, what sets AccuRev apart is focus
> on modeling the processes within software development
> organizations.
> 
> Bzr, hg, etc have a branch-centric view of the world and
> provide a bunch of mechanisms for interacting with other
> branches.  And AccuRev has entirely comparable features.
> But what AccuRev adds is a higher level understanding that
> real world processes span branches.  In providing a global
> view of the world as a meaningfully related set of branches
> AccuRev provides the building blocks to describe, model and
> monitor the flows of changes between those branches.

Well, bzr, hg, git and monotone are more revision-centric than branch
centric. Every change gets a unique ID and it's known under that ID in all
branches it is merged into. Therefore I think the important data should
actually be there. We need -- and plan -- an ability to attach additional
metadata to revisions. We also need tools to mine in the data.

> Some may recall past posts where I have argued for an ability
> to define project policies (eg filename case rules) and then
> to have the system comply with / enforce those policies.  In
> the realm of branch policies AccuRev very much seems to have
> that kind of functionality.

Well, I don't think policy belongs to a version control tool. It should be
built on top of it.

For branch policies, you can't really enforce anything without a central
server. But for bzr, there is the patch-queue-manager and it in fact can
enforce policies -- it can be configured to run whatever checks on a merge
request you want.

[...]

> So what does it lack?  Well it is based on a single server.
> So with projects like bzr and hg having so many similarities,
> it is tantalizing to imagine a distributed AccuRev equivalent.
> 
> If you are interested in learning more AccuRev offers free
> evaluation copies though you have to request an evaluation
> registration key.  I have confirmed that just installing
> the Windows package (http://www.accurev.com/download.htm)
> provides all of the documentation.  I would expect that the
> same holds for the other packages.

Given that you have already looked at it, it would be nice if you could fill
feature-requests for things you would particularly like to see in bzr.

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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