[Scummvm-devel] Switching from SVN to git, mercurial or bazaar

[Max Horn]

Am 07.06.2009 um 23:04 schrieb Oystein Eftevaag:

> A few people at work were evaluating this.
>
> Mercurial came out on top, since it has 1) Very good cross-platform
> capabilities due to being written in python, instead of a weird mix of
> perl and shell scripts and whatnot like git is, and 2) Better GUI
> support than git, like TortoiseHG for instance.

<rant>
Actually, I never understood the desire for these GUI tools, but  
that's just me :). I tried using GUI frontends for CVS and SVN for  
years, (in fact I started with one, since back then on MacOS 8, there  
was simply no alternative to that ;). I never stay long, because,  
well, I just type "git diff" quicker than it takes most of these tools  
to update their fancy window with the list of files in the dir (which  
I have to wait for before I can click the "diff" button, which then  
opens a new window which renders data... in the meantime, in the  
terminal I already finished scanning through the brief diff ;).
</rant>

That said, I understand that support for Windows, and GUI tools, are  
important for many tools, and I don't want to needlessly cripple their  
ability to interact with the main ScummVM repository!

I actually did my first DVCS experiments with Mercurial, hoping that  
it being python based, I would be able to setup my own mini-mercurial  
server on my webspace (which supports Python). I never got that  
working, but anyway, it certainly intrigues me.

The main reason for me to first try git *in depth* certainly was git- 
svn; this tool, while far from perfect, allowed me to heavily test  
git, while doing actual work on ScummVm (as opposed to any kind of  
test repository, which I would never have hit as hard as I did this  
way ;).

I just checked whether Mercurial has a similar bridge between itself  
and SVN, and found this site: <http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/? 
p=116>. I'll take a look, if it does, I am going to install that, too,  
and will run it in parallel to git-svn. And would encourage everybody  
to do the same, to collect experience with either tool :).



> Bazaar wasn't really an
> option, apparently, due to a more limited featureset (it's also used  
> far
> less than the other two alternatives, probably for just that reason).

In truth, I believe the reason that bazaar is less widely known and  
spread has more to do with popularity of the existing DVCS solution;  
with who was where first; marketing; it's close ties to Ubuntu/ 
LaunchPad/Canonical, etc.. I.e. I think Bazaar is not that bad, but it  
has nothing *really* compelling over Mercurial and git, and since  
everybody is already talking about it, bazaar (and several other DVCS)  
get somewhat neglected ;).


Bye,
Max