Hi Ben, I'm sorry I did a wrong remark there, but I see you saw what I meant.
The nice thing about open source projects is that communities develop naturally around them, it becomes an ecosystem, everything tends to lean towards balance, when a change is intended to be made it should be allowed to develop organically. Point here is: lets not try to force DVCSs but rather keep the door open so the community can pass through it whenever it feels ready, so the dilema of current devs vs potential devs never happens. My advice here is —if current devs are willing— to pilot test a DVCS on a small part of the project where it can be used primarily (as in not with subversion); this would be a very healthy exercise to understand the why of this generalized DVCS-ish concern. Another advice is to open the discussion towards the choice of a DVCS in comparison to the project's interests and demographics (e.g. if there are more windows users than mac/linux, mercurial would be preferred, if its the other way around && there is an underlying git community, git might be best). To all who doubt DVCS, this is a good read for you: http://hginit.com/00.html In relation to Drak's remarks, yes, I think the maturity of the tools has contributed to its increased usage, and also, the very cool services around them, such as github.com and bitbucket.org. Finally, I think from here on, the conversation should be focused on finding a technical solution to the load problem (I'm not familiar with the setup, but if I think of something I'll post it). Regards, David On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Ben Schmidt <mail_ben_schm...@yahoo.com.au > wrote: > Just for the record....I didn't say popularity was a reason to use a DVCS. > I said the popularity of DVCSes might cause server strain (if a lot of > people want to convert the public SVN repo to a distributed one, downloading > all the changes in the repo, which SVN really wasn't designed for, that > would be a heavy load--and positively correlated to popularity: more > popular, more conversions, more load). > > I agree with your closing point, though: I'd love to see us look for a > low-load way of providing an Hg mirror and/or a Git mirror. I also think > that either a mirror or a change of VCS may attract developers in the > medium-term. However, I also think that current developers carry a lot more > weight than potential developers, and it's important for them to be able to > work in a way that is comfortable for them. So a mirror or two would be > nice, and I'd push for that, but a change of official repo I will merely > suggest be considered longer term. > > Ben. > > > > > On 28/04/11 1:07 PM, dukeofgaming wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I'm not a frequent poster in the list but I thought I'd really should give >> my 1 cent here when I saw "popular" being an argument for using DVCSs, its >> not, and its neither fashion nor cargo cult, it is just a plain eye opener >> experience of how neither SVN or CVS are the base of all versioning (two >> of >> its creators —Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman— have acknowledged >> this by saying "sorry about that" with regards to Subversion) and that >> better and more natural ways to collaborate and integrate code. >> >> I could provide an epically long argument here, but instead I'll link to >> the >> one I've already made, diagrams and graphics included =): >> >> >> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/35074/im-a-subversion-geek-why-i-should-consider-or-not-consider-mercurial-or-git-or/35080#35080 >> >> So, I don't want to make debate here of wether centralized is better than >> distributed (because the point is moot), but I think its not a good >> situation for the community to have a previously open door to DVCSs now >> closed. >> >> Perhaps a solution can be found to even open the door to Mercurial (that >> is >> an excellent place to start with DVCSs because its simplicity and >> straight-forwardness) in addition to git in such a way that doesn't stress >> the server?. >> >> Regards, >> >> David >> >> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Drak<d...@zikula.org> wrote: >> >> On 28 April 2011 07:55, Ben Schmidt<mail_ben_schm...@yahoo.com.au> >>> wrote: >>> >>> I realise that at least for now, PHP is sticking with SVN. No problems. >>>> >>>> >>> I realise this is not the topic of discussion but I have to say, that >>> overall, a switch to DVCS would make a huge difference to PHP development >>> life cycles. Git for one, makes contributing and integration of patches >>> a >>> completely different experience. It encourages more community >>> participation >>> without impinging on quality since you don't need to grant commit >>> permissions. The whole workflow of creating and integrating patches is >>> much >>> faster and more simple because you can switch context from branch to >>> branch >>> almost instantly allowing those with commit permissions to verify if a >>> contribution is worth merging or not. It's much less work than SVN and >>> the >>> ease naturally attracts contributors. Merging is not a pita like with >>> SVN. >>> >>> However, given the recent security breach there is another side: >>> Tampering >>> with a git repository is virtually impossible because every commit hash >>> is >>> generated from the previous ones, so if your servers were compromised >>> again, >>> a change in the past history would require alteration every single commit >>> hash since that change and the resulting HEAD hash would be different. >>> Since hashes are based on the commit contents it's just not feasible >>> even >>> if SHA1 was one day compromised that you could successfully tamper with a >>> previous commit and engineer the calculations so the current HEAD hash >>> remained unchanged. If a commit blob (on the file-system) was altered >>> manually, your git repo would simply fail to validate the next time you >>> use >>> it. In every scenario you'd know immediately something was wrong and not >>> have to go looking for it commit by commit. >>> >>> Something to consider again in the future at least. >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Drak >>> >>> >>
