On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 10:40 PM, James Hess
<address@hidden> wrote:
However, the outage of CVS is an opportune time to switch to anything
else, anything that's better than CVS...
Yes ...
GIT has its advantages, though I must admit i'm partial to Mercurial...
Distributed VCS like Git and friends have a disadvantage that they are
relatively complex, much more complex to manage than VCS
like SVN, and not that advantageous unless you have a
large number of developers.
Particularly a lot of developers who wouldn't have commit access,
working on various projects that don't overlap
Even with smaller projects, I find it easier to work with git repositories than with CVS if I need to customize the project for my own use. I can keep track of the changes in a local history rather than make separate patch files. And once the customizations are done, I have the history all ready to push should I get commit rights sometime in the future. (In fact, I already have treecc in a git repo I made from CVS the other
day - I'm just waiting for Klaus to set up the offical repo so I can push my fixes up :-) ).
The question would be... are GITs strengths useful to the project?
Maybe, maybe not...
I have some ideas on improving treecc - but don't want to break the common version until I have something stable to replace it. So git is definitely useful to me: I can work on it in a separate repo locally without losing the change history in some mega-patch later.
I would say that SVN is probably an easier conversion to make
immediately that CVS users should be easily able to adapt to (because
Subversion has many close similarities to CVS). GIT has a hefty
learning curve.
At the company where I work we recently moved to git from perforce (commercial VCS with a central repository structure). You can use it like a centralized VCS if you want to, and only move on to branches and peer-to-peer pulls later. Or never move on. I can help coach people during the dotgnu-pnet transition if you'd like - it took a few weeks at my company and then we wondered why we'd ever used perforce.
I suggest that we keep the CVS version of dotgnu-pnet for a couple of months during the transition (clearly labelled as read-only). Then if git turns into a nightmare, we can extract the patches and re-apply them to CVS (or SVN).
Cheers,
Rhys.