Brief article on benchmarks of Python repository with leading DVCSen

[John Szakmeister]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Nicholas Allen
<nick.allen at onlinehome.de> wrote:
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> Matthieu Moy wrote:
>> Nicholas Allen <nicholas.allen at ableton.com> writes:
>>
>>> I think the time Bazaar saves me with its proper support for renaming
>>> and merging is far more significant than a few seconds performing not
>>> so frequent commands.
>>
>> Can you detail what's wrong with Git's support for merging and
>> renaming?
>>
>
> My understanding of git (which is most likely old and obsolete so be
> easy on me!) is that it doesn't track file or directory renames
> explicitly. Instead it looks at the contents of the files being
> versioned. This is not good enough for me. I do a lot of refactoring in
> Eclipse and it is important that the renaming of Java classes are
> recorded exactly. The contents of the file may have changed drastically
> when a class is renamed. When I merge from someone else I need the
> changes they made to go into the correct class. I also want a conflict
> when a file is renamed differently in 2 different branches and then merged.

I'm not so convinced of this.  I've been playing with different merge
scenarios and git has performed acceptably in all of them.

Personally, I'm very much on the fence right now.  To be honest, we've
looked pretty hard at Bazaar and continue to because of it's
Subversion integration (many of our customers use Subversion), the
fact that it's cross-platform, and because the community seems pretty
vibrant (not that git's isn't, but I've met some of the Bazaar devs at
the last PyCon and they're a friendly crowd!).

FWIW, I've been using git on some pet projects, and it's speed is
astounding.  It's been a real pleasure to use.  And, believe it or
not, I don't find git any harder to use than Bazaar.  Especially when
I have to start thinking about shared repos, repository formats, and
whether I've bundled something correctly (or used a merge directive?
I dunno, I'm still rather confused on some of this).

We've got some fairly large code bases at work (they take 2 hours to
check out over a fast link via mod_dav_svn).  Merging stinks, and
either tool helps with most of that.  But at this point, I really want
my VCS to get out of my devs' way, and make these operations fast (and
do them correctly) so they can get back to work.  And remote branching
and merging are two things we do rather often (we work on a number of
different projects, and they constantly change), so I'd like to us to
feel as little pain as possible on those fronts.

-John