thought of the day: bzr is making some developers' heads hurt.

[Marius Kruger]

I was reading:
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsGit#head-5dd8613f1f333ead9dbb6acea70cd6ccedb7ea64

and found a link to a long svn mail by Karl Fogel (who is helping out here
now too AIUI):
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2007-06/0780.shtml
==

> Those of us who work in version control, who think about branching and
> merging and change algebra and diff3/diff4 algorithms all day, often
> forget this. One of Subversion's biggest advantages, and one of the
> reasons it's taking over the world, is that it's really easy to
> understand. There's a repository; you check stuff out; you modify the
> stuff; you check it back in. Comprehensibility is a big part of
> survivability: wherever Subversion goes from here, it must not become
> so complex that it can't be explained in five minutes or less with no
> questions from the audience. (I've witnessed enough explanations of
> decentralized systems to know that their learning curve is generally a
> bit steeper, though it may well be worth it.)

==

This made me think of something somebody at work asked me recently:
"I need to backport this fix to an older release branch, but I don't want to
think about it. Can you quickly do it for me?"

Granted it is not the simplest of scenarios, and our setup is also
suboptimal (even unoptimal :) .
(several developers sharing the same workingtrees on a dev server,
because the setup for the whole system is so complicated it was deemed
better to just
set up one instance and we share it)

Anyways, I can see that a lot of deverlopers think that bzr is complicated.
Maybe because as Karl says we are doing complicated things.

The sad thing now is that the powers that be, will probably decide that we
have to standardise on svn now (for this and other reasons). That would just
break my heart.
Don't worry, I won't go down without a fight (among others blaming our
setup).
It might sound stupid that one might consider resigning over a version
control system,
but bzr has grown so much a part of my lifestyle, that I can't imagine
living without it.
Ah well if it does happen, I assume bzr-svn is going to get a workout from
me,
expect patches :)

So I hope you guys are inspired to help out Karl in doing better PR and
user-friendlier UI's/GUI's for bzr,
it could save someone's life!

-- 
<| regards
U| Marius
H| <><
Z| http://amanica.blogspot.com/
<|
E| http://bazaar-vcs.org/
<| because I don't trust version control systems with less than 14777 unit
tests
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