Fwd: [Python-Dev] Primer on distributed revision control?

[Ian Clatworthy]

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 9:47 AM
> Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Primer on distributed revision control?
> To: "skip at pobox.com" <skip at pobox.com>
> Cc: python-dev at python.org
> 
> 
> On 21/03/2008, skip at pobox.com <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>  > With all these distributed revision control systems now available (bzr, hg,
>  >  darcs, svk, many more), I find I need an introduction to the concepts and
>  >  advantages of repository distribution.  It seems to me that it has the
>  >  potential for leading to anarchy, though I can see how some things would be
>  >  improved (working offline, maintaining local patches).  It's not obvious how
>  >  I push changes back upstream.  Can someone point me to some useful content
>  >  (web pages or books) which will help me wrap my brain around the ideas?
>  >  Maybe a compare/contrast of the major players?
> 
>  The Mercurial book is good (http://hgbook.red-bean.com/) although it's
>  Mercurial-specific (unsurprisingly). The Bazaar user guide
>  (http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/index.html) isn't
>  bad, either, although I personally prefer the Mercurial book.

Paul,

I'm not on the python-dev mailing list so apologies if you've answered
this already ....

Any reason why you prefer the Hg book to the Bazaar User Guide? While I
got a lot out of the Hg book when I first read it 12-18 months ago, my
feeling at the time was that the material could be much better
organised, and that it focussed too much on internal data management and
not enough on good processes and supporting procedures. I wrote most of
the opening chapters of the Bazaar UG reflecting these biases, so I'd
like to know what we could do to make it better and more useful to the
kind souls who actually read documentation. :-)

>  I've yet to see a really good side-by-side comparison of Mercurial and
>  Bazaar, which is a shame, as these 2 are to my mind, the hardest to
>  differentiate in terms of features, etc. (Mercurial is generally
>  considered faster, although Bazaar has caught up a lot recently. An up
>  to date performance comparison would be interesting).

That's *really* difficult to do. Furthermore, any comparison has a shelf
life of under 6 months as both tools are continuing to (rapidly) evolve.
If I could make two generalisations:

1. Bazaar started later than and hence behind the other tools. Every
   month, the feature and performance gap between it and the other
   tools is narrowing. (My view is that the tools are pretty much
   on feature parity when taken as a "complete" package, though
   opinions vary greatly on that depending on what features matter
   the most to different teams. To my surprise, the feedback I got
   at PyCon was that Bazaar was now well ahead of Mercurial
   feature-wise.)

2. The only "winner" out of the fierce DVCS competition we're seeing
   will be open source & developers in general - all three leading tools
   will be adopted by many projects. If you don't need to make a
   choice yet, don't. The options in 6 months will be sweeter.
   I'm personally really looking forward to many of the features we
   discussed in our recent sprint. When they arrive, I honestly can't
   see many reasons why any project couldn't adopt it and be
   genuinely happy about doing so.

Ian C.