[Adium-devl] Version control

[Andreas Monitzer]

On Oct 08, 2007, at 10:16, Colin Barrett wrote:

> - Local commits! Same awesome features of version control, for local
> and offline work.

That's called "code bombs".

> - You can publish your changes for others to see, /without/ affecting
> the main repository /at all/.

Yes, that's nice.

> - Much much much better merging than the svn we have now. Like, omg.
> With hg I can do:
>
> % hg pull
> ... (+1 heads, run hg merge to merge)
> % hg merge
> 0 files added, 1 file merged
>
> Or sometimes even just hg pull, and it *just fucking works*. If there
> are conflicts while merging, it opens FileMerge.app and to let me edit
> that particular conflict, until I've solved all the conflicts, and
> then it's done. It's hot. (Although I don't think I'd recommend hg for
> other reasons).

svn can do all that, too. I've heard that in version 1.5, merging  
should become much better, so you'd have less conflicts.
Conflicts are not something that's inherently solved by going  
distributed -- quite the contrary in fact -- it just happens that the  
DVCS are better at it (so I've heard) since they need it more.  
However, svn can become that good, too.

In my personal experience with mtn, merging is just as conflict prone  
as in svn (two concurrent changes in the same function, and you have  
a problem).
Additionally, the multiple heads issue struck me once when I tried to  
fetch the latest pidgin version. I had to pick one of the heads at  
random, since the committers forgot to merge them, and I didn't want  
to mess with their code by doing it myself.

andy