[Lazarus] SubVersion vs Git

[Alexander Klenin]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 22:18, Florian Klaempfl <florian at freepascal.org> wrote:
> No. The point is that a dvcs has drawbacks. The distributed nature
> requires a very strict management of repository structure and for the
> changeset flow.
Hm. It is true that DCVS _allow_ various policies and workflows unavailable
to centralized ones, but I do not see how such policies are required.
While, as I said, I do not advocate moving Lazarus to DCVS at this time,
I think your notion of DCVS complexity is exaggerated.

Let us see if I can help it ;-)

> Which repository is used the create the releases?
The one currently agreed on by the developers -- just as with SVN.

> Who merges to this repository and when?
Those who have access to it -- similar to commit access with SVN.
(Or even only one person, as is the case with Linux -- but this is the extreme
decentralization, there is no need to go this far).

> What if somebody never pushes his changes and keeps them local till his harddisk breaks?
His changes do not get into the release -- same as if he would make changes
to his working copy in SVN and not commit / send patches out.
Notice the very important difference here: while in SVN these changes
are "hidden"
and not available to other users/developers, DVCS allow others to
use/test/review/build upon changes even before they hit the central repository.
Another DCVS advantage is that the local changes need not be lumped
together into a single commit, which is very important for large changes.

> How does testing work?
As usual, somebody runs tests and checks the results.

>When are tests run? At every commit? Every push?
That, or at every pull/fetch, or periodically --
there is no difference in centralized vs distributed VCS here.

-- 
Alexander S. Klenin
Insight Experts Ltd.