[Monotone-devel] Re: Mozilla goes mercurial

[Bruce Stephens]

Graydon Hoare <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> I can speak a bit about this; Paul's post oversimplifies for the sake
> of expedience (which is fine, he asked me what to say and I told him
> to oversimplify). I explicitly asked for monotone to be excluded part
> way through the process, and there were a bunch of reasons.

Thanks for sharing this.

[...]

> #2: Reducing the number of candidates. This is weird to mention, but
> having 4 or more competing systems that are *almost* as capable as one
> another means that you waste time comparing them when you could be
> getting on with using them.

That's not weird to mention at all.  Making choices takes time, and if
the choice is hard to make, there's a decent chance it'll take longer
for no significant benefit.

[...]

> #3: I'm involved.

Right, I thought that might well be significant.

[...]

> For whatever it's worth, I'm actually quite pleased with the
> result. I don't really see these systems as competing as much as
> co-evolving, and enabling massive increase in the rate of free
> software evolution. In the early 2000s, anyone I described this sort
> of tool to thought it was crazy and would never work. Merge *after*
> commit?  Branches with *multiple* heads? *Content addresses* in
> history graphs?  *No* canonical servers? Now all this is the
> standard, and we're quibbling over who does it fastest. Who cares?
> The battle is won: DVCS technology works fantastically well -- using
> the model we pioneered -- and free implementations of it are
> absorbing many major projects. That's cause for celebration.

Absolutely: I suspect we live in the golden age of version control
systems.  (For what it's worth, I think Tom Lord deserves significant
credit for that, just for demonstrating that it's not too hard to
produce a working distributed VCS.  Not that I'd recommend GNU Arch on
anyone, but at the time it was a significant surprise to me.)

And as you say, we're at the stage when suggesting a DVCS (with these
strange features of non-linear history, etc.) as a replacement for CVS
isn't regarded as insane; only a year or two ago subversion would have
often been the major candidate.