BDFL decision of Python's DVCS

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nicholas Allen writes:

 > > Bazaar's technical advantages are minute (very few projects
 > > rename files at rates of more than a tiny handful per year),
 > 
 > Could that be because it's such an absolute pain in Subversion so
 > users don't attempt to do this?

That's certainly part of it, at least for Java programmers.  But
personally, I work in C, Lisp, and Python most, and I've only rarely
been tempted to rename files.  In those cases I never considered the
VCS issue, nor have I been bothered by it ex post.  Much more
important is the annoyance it would cause my coworkers.

 > you want to do this and in my case that is extremely often. Maybe
 > when Python refactoring tools mature a bit and catch up with Java
 > this will be more of an issue for Python developers...

Maybe, although the BDFL regularly refers to Java best practices as
"anti-patterns for Python".  I suspect file-per-class is one of them.
But if you do have multiple classes per file, and the file name need
have no direct relation with any class name, then I think the pressure
to rename files becomes much less.

Anyway, I have to retract or at least qualify the statement that the
technical advantages are minute.  That refers to a subset of projects,
which doesn't include Java projects (and there are a lot of those!),
but does include most Python projects, including all of CPython.