Whose distributed VCS is the most distributed?

[Matthieu Moy]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> writes:

>> The history is certainly preserved; at least, you can access the
>> individual commits if you so wish, by specifying the full revision-id of
>> the changeset you'd like to acess to.
>
> Well, not just that (I tried it); you have to also know the revid of the
> previous changeset on the same branch.  There doesn't appear to be any
> nice way to discover that automatically.

What's "-r before:revid:foo" meant for then?

Not all DVCS are Darcs, and not all DVCS are patch-based. Bazaar is
snapshot-based, that is, the revision identifier refers to the state
of your project at a given stage. The notion of patch of Darcs does
not really exist in Bazaar.

It seems all you're interested is to view the diff introduced by a
revision. There are many things one may want to do with it. You can
get the content of a file at this point, view the diff between this
revision and any other one (in a distributed environment, people
usually commit very often, and individual revisions usually introduce
too few changes to be actually useful), revert your tree to that
revision, ...

> I'll also note that this doesn't help with cherry-picked merges.

Cherrypicking is still on the TODO-list, so no big surprise to find
the support for it weak, yes. And obviously, the patch theory of Darcs
is very well suited for cherrypicking.

-- 
Matthieu