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

[Paul Moore]

On 25/03/2008, Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
> 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. :-)

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure I can remember now how I formed that
impression. I'll reread both and see if I can be more concrete.

A couple of superficial things do come to mind, though:

1. The hg book is available in PDF format, so I have a printed copy to
hand. File/print from a web page just isn't anything like as good.

2. The hg book uses diagrams much more effectively. In particular,
simple, clean box & arrow diagrams. The only diagrams in the bzr
manual are the workflow ones, and the "cute" people pictures and
hand-drawn style arrows don't seem as clear to me.

> >  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.

Oh, I know it's hard! But to my mind, bzr and hg are *so* close in
feature set and intent that it's really difficult to make a clear
decision. Maybe I'll try to put together my thoughts, like I did with
the performance figures, and see what people think.

> 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.)

I agree with this. Bazaar development appears far faster and more
active than Mercurial's. But there's more to it than just what you
*can* do, it's also about *how* you do things (please excuse me if I
leave that as a vague generalisation for now - I have a good idea as
to what I mean, but it would take too much space here to clarify, so
I'll save it for a separate post).

> 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.

That's very true. I don't have strong pressure to make a choice right
now, as my only personal choice will be for local, small projects.

>   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.

That sounds good!
Paul.