VCS comparison table

[John Yates]

On Friday 2006-10-27 John Arbash Meinel wrote:

> Well, there is:

Yes, I was already familiar with both of these pages.

> http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/tutorial.htm

This is only a tutorial.  It make no attempt to define the
semantic model.  Here I use the term model as it has been
used throughout this thread.  I crave a presentation devoid
optimizations and implementation details.

> and
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/Classes

Pretty thin, lots of undefined terminology and ultimately
rather implementation focused (e.g. class WorkingTree is
described as responsible for maintaining the stat cache).

The presentation I would dearly love to see would take
the basic commands presented in the tutorial and would
describe only those objects necessary to explicate the
behavior of each command.  Such descriptions, though prose,
ought to be sufficiently abstract, rigorous and complete
that one could imagine translation into denotation semantics.
(That'll teach ya from introducing unnecessary details
and from being excessively concrete! :-)

I appreciate how darcs includes in its command overview
a table listing which commands affect which components of
their model:

  http://www.darcs.net/manual/bigpage.html#SECTION00700000000000000000

(Yes, I know a model with only 2 components cannot honestly
be deemed complete, but this is at least a real example drawn
from the dvc world of explaining operations in terms of the
piece of the model with which those operations interact.)


/john