Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2008-01-07 09:15, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>>     "the current development version" is not a concept for git.  No
>>     repository is special as far as git is concerned.  The "current
>>     development version" is a social, not a technical concept.  For example,
>>     the git maintainer was off-line unexpectedly for some months recently.
>>     Somebody else took over seamlessly by collecting, arranging and
>>     coordinating patches on the git list into _his_ repository.
>>
>> With CVS, people can get the current version of every program on
>> savannah in a uniform way.  What you say seems to imply that that is
>> not possible with git.  That seems like a big step backwards.
>
> Huh?  Declare a repository as official, and people can sync to it and
> "get the current version of every program on Savannah in a uniform way".
> They can sync to any other repository (or pull changes on top of other
> already pulled changes), too, without disturbing their setup.  But it is
> not like they would magically get something they didn't ask for, or
> would not always be able to tell what changes in addition to the
> Savannah remote state they had applied in their own repository.

I think there's a misunderstanding, but it's ok.

Richard, the main `new feature' of a DVCS is not that it changes
anything about the `central' repository.  It would still be possible to
name a well defined, well known place where the official Emacs source
tree lives.  Since savannah is a well known place for Emacs, that's
where the official tree should be, of course.

>> Within a community of people that work together, it won't be a
>> problem.  They will know to look THERE instead of HERE.  But users in
>> general can't be expected to check for that sort of thing before they
>> get the current development Emacs.
>
> Huh?  I can get an rsync of Emacs CVS, check something into that copy
> and publish it on a server.  Same thing.  A user can't usefully work
> with two CVS repositories at once, sure, but the THERE/HERE confusion is
> just the same.

... and this scratches the surface of the `new feature' of a DVCS.
There is still a `central' repository, which is well known and used for
the official releases.  But developers can *also* collaborate with each
other by directly exchanging changesets with each other.  They don't
have to specificlly go through a single CVS tree to do this.  They still
*can* go through the `central' repository for all their work, it's just
not mandatory.

- Giorgos