Introduction to Ubuntu Distributed Development

[Jordan Mantha]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Scott James Remnant <scott at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 11:59 -0500, Adrian Perez wrote:
>
>> But you might agree that work was accomplished by several people, and
>> not a single person. No need to tell us that you need a Git-enable infra
>> to compare with, when you know that can't be accomplished without the
>> community support as has the bzr one evolved from both canonical and the
>> community itself.
>>
> Nothing is stopping any Ubuntu Developer (even those who work for
> Canonical) from building things with GIT or Mercurial if they like.  I
> take the fact that none of them are doing it as a sign that none of them
> actually want it.

I think that approach might be a bit deceiving. It has been pretty
clear from the beginning that Launchpad (and hence Ubuntu to a great
extent) was going to use bzr and only bzr. I would suggest that Ubuntu
uses bzr primarily because Canonical created bzr and not because it
was far and away the greatest DVCS out there at the time. I think it's
pretty clearly a case of "those who fund the tools get to pick the
tools". That's not necessarily bad or anything, but I think it's an
important thing to acknowledge how decisions get made.

> Indeed, the overwhelming feeling towards GIT I get from #ubuntu-devel is
> one of dislike rather than love.

Is that because of culture or quality of tools? I'm guessing people
who would rather use git/hg just learn to shut up because it doesn't
matter. I would also guess that the number of Ubuntu Developers who'd
like to see more git support in Ubuntu is pretty significant. A whole
lot of upstreams are moving to git and Debian is increasingly doing so
as well. Having tools in common with the other people working on the
code is often more important than the actual tool itself and having to
learn multiple DVCSes is a pain.

> If I'm wrong, and there's a hoard of developers aching to use GIT
> instead of bzr, then vote with your code editor! :-)

That is true, but it is also quite difficult to do. Canonical pretty
much has the monopoly on the Ubuntu infrastructure and has said that
non-bzr tools will not be supported by Launchpad. Without Launchpad
support it's not exactly a very level playing field.

I'm not suggesting that Ubuntu should ditch bzr or throw away all the
hard work that's been done especially in the last year. But let's not
kid ourselves either, Ubuntu uses bzr because it was selected for us
by sabdfl/Canonical, not because we collectively decided that it was
the way to go.

I really don't see Ubuntu moving away from bzr as a lot of time and
effort has already been put into making it the de facto standard and
it basically gets the job done. I just hope the git <--> bzr and hg
<--> bzr tools reach a level where the choice of DVCS isn't an issue.
Interestingly, it actually seemed a lot easier when everybody was
using SVN and we just got to pick which *-svn we used. :-)

-Jordan