[DGD] The future of DGD

[bart at wotf.org]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 14:56:00 -0800, Shentino wrote
> I figured that this early stage would be the best opportunity to resolve
> anything that needed resolving.
> 
> Speaking in general, and not just about DGD-OSR...
> 
>  My commentary on merging is theoretical only.  I've never actually done
> much actual merging in any VCS but rumors are strong that they are a 
> major league hassle in subversion.

The bottomline is that no VCS knows your actual intentions with the merger, or
understands what the code does. 

Just for those reasons, any merging at the very least requires care and
thought, and can be somewhat of a hassle depending on the changes, and
regardless of the system.

More modern systems tend to have somewhat better tools for dealing with
conflicts while merging.

This all said, merging Felix' changes to dgd into the -net, way of the force
and gurbalib svn repositories has been an automated process most of the time,
only requiring manual intervention once for the actual code merging (when the
kfun version number got added). This is obviously not the most complex case
one could get, but it is likely quite representative for the kind of merging
we'll have to deal with.

In my mind, the 'merging in svn is hell' mantra is a sellingpoint that only
has a remote relationship with reality. That is not to say there aren't
systems that are better at it, that is an entirely different thing.

> 
> One other thing I'd like to mention is that DVCSs like git, hg, and 
> bzr tend to be useful in allowing you to do work offline and 
> sandboxed. 

I've worked on things offline for over a decade using cvs and about 5 years
with svn. It affects your workflow, but its far from impossible, and only
becomes a hassle when projects are big and have people work on potentially
conflicting things in parallel.

Sourceforge, subversion etc, its all not the best, but very likely sufficient,
and very convenient. This consideration may change depending on the size and
complexity of a project. If its found to be too much of a limitation, it can
be changed.

Bart.
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