Re: Design by Community

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

>Hi,
>
>
>  
>
>>  I know some very wise people have decided, apparently without much
>>discussion with the community, that GNOME would switch to Subversion.
>>But I keep thinking that, although Subversion is much better than CVS,
>>maybe we would benefit more from a distributed version control system,
>>like mercurial, bzr, git, monotone, etc.
>>    
>>
>
>One of the drawbacks of these distributed version control systems is
>precisely the fact that it makes it very easy to keep private "branches"
>around.
>
>All things equal, it would work against the goal of trying to make sure
>development happens in public.
>
>That's probably a very good reason why subversion may be the best choice
>for GNOME at this point.
>  
>
We've already got people maintaining private branches while we're still
on CVS (e.g. the panel menu changes being discussed in this very thread).

>From my point of view, one of the major benefits of the various
distributed revision control systems is better _merging_ rather than
better _branching_.

Given that we've already got people maintaining off-mainline branches,
wouldn't it make sense to use a system that makes it easier to pull the
good changes back to the mainline?  Subversion doesn't seem to bring us
any closer to doing that.

James.