On Feb 9, 2012 7:01 AM, "John Cremona" <john.crem...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone still use branches?

I haven't in years!

>I used to always do a "sage -clone"
> right after building a test version, but since using queues I never do
> that.  If I need to test something which affects more than the Sage
> library, notably a new version of an spkg, I just copy the entire
> build using cp -r, and work on that.
>
> John
>
> On 9 February 2012 14:56, Keshav Kini <keshav.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 01:45, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Keshav Kini <keshav.k...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> >>> My $0.02.
> >>
> >> I disagree with what you wrote above.  Perhaps you have a different
> >> impression than me of how Mercurial is used, given the relative sizes
> >> of our contributions to the Sage library.
> >>
> >> deep:hilbert wstein$ hg log|grep -i keshav|wc -l
> >>       9
> >> deep:hilbert wstein$ hg log|grep -i wstein|wc -l
> >>    5368
> >
> > Zing! Indeed, I talk too much and walk too little :) Hopefully this
> > will change as I gain more practical experience, and critically in the
> > case of the Sage library, more knowledge of mathematics...
> >
> >> This strikes me as hyperbole: "We currently get zero benefit from
> >> using a distributed version control system."
> >
> > OK, you're right, that's a bit of an exaggeration, even in the context
> > of benefit to collaboration. Certainly there are many local benefits
> > of using Mercurial over, say, Subversion for our source control, chief
> > among which I would count the ability to quickly make clones, or to
> > even ship a repository in our source distribution (and even our binary
> > distribution!) at all. This latter is important since it allows users
> > to revert code to a known good state, and just generally keep track of
> > their own code, I guess.
> >
> > Even when collaborating with others, there are some advantages of
> > using Mercurial over using nothing at all, such as the ability to
> > easily create patches against released code without needing to keep a
> > vanilla code directory alongside your sandbox directory... as is
> > nevertheless a practice suggested, strangely enough, to new developers
> > both by the developer's guide and tacitly by the fact that the concept
> > of "Sage branches" (no relation to Mercurial "named branches" or git
> > "topic branches") is so pervasive in Sage's scripts.
> >
> > I guess the main reason for "Sage branches" is to avoid needless
> > Cython recompilations that happen when you push and pop patches on
> > your queue a lot in one "Sage branch". I hope this can be fixed in the
> > future, perhaps by building VCS revision names into files generated by
> > Cython, and loading them using symlinks, or something like that, but
> > in any case I doubt a new developer will be modifying code that will
> > result in huge Cython passes... or is that another misconception?
> >
> > But in any case it is still true that we could be getting a lot more
> > benefit out of distributed version control than we currently are, IMO,
> > by ditching patches and using the history tree for live development
> > rather than as a dead changelog.
> >
> >> That said, picking apart what you write would be counterproductive,
> >> because I greatly appreciate that you are so motivated to help us with
> >> transitioning to more efficient workflows, git, etc., and I sort of
> >> want you to continue to believe what you wrote even if it isn't
> >> technically 100% true. :-).
> >
> > I would like to avoid being a mindless zealot if at all possible :)
> > But I'll defer to your judgment on the matter, haha.
> >
> > -Keshav
> >
> > ----
> > Join us in #sagemath on irc.freenode.net !
> >
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