[Adium-devl] Version control

[Andreas Monitzer]

On Oct 08, 2007, at 06:25, Colin Barrett wrote:

> 1) We should move Adium to /some/ sort of distributed version control
> system.
>
> DVCS is the way of the future.

That shouldn't be an argument at all. Just because it's hip right at  
the moment doesn't mean that you should jump ship to the buzzword of  
the day.

> It's not just the better merging that
> it gets you. developers *and* new contributors get access to the same
> tools. It makes it much easier for new contributors to get involved,
> since we can easily pull in their changes, and giving them "commit
> access" is just as easy as giving them access to push to the branch we
> release off of.

This contradicts the next point. mtn actually makes it much *harder*  
to begin contributing code, or even just testing the latest  
development version.

> 2) We should move Adium to mtn.

*ANYTHING* but mtn! Fetching an mtn repository (even just for read- 
only access to compile the latest development version) involves  
fetching a database file in the hundreds of MB (that's for pidgin,  
probably more for Adium).
I've been using mtn for GSoC at libpurple, it feels like working back  
in the 1980ies. Syncing changes takes about half an hour over my  
2MBit/s Internet connection (depending on the amount of changes on  
both sides, but that was a usual number over the summer), where it  
takes 5secs for svn.
Sean blamed that on the slow server, but why does a VCS require so  
much computing power?

> Moving Adium to monotone is, at this point, the path of least
> resistance. The people that we collaborate the most with, pidgin, are
> using monotone.

They moved far too early in the game, the other tools have become  
much better since then.

> Counter: They are not dead set on it, and the land of DVCS is changing
> rapidly (bzr is getting faster, git is getting easier to use, etc).
> Maybe now another VCS makes sense for both them and for us. Rlaager
> said that they might be willing to switch if it'll make life easier
> for them and us.

Over the summer, I had to use darcs to fetch another project's  
repository (right now, every project seems to have their own DVCS  
program). This was just as simple to use as svn, and just as fast.  
This was read-only though, I don't know how good the developer side  
of it is.

andy