Bryan W Taylor posted a very intriguing writeup a bit earlier, titled: “The Need for Distributed Version Control in the Enterprise“.

There are a few points of the article that seem a bit controversial. For instance, I am not sure I totally agree with the comments abouts “feature scoped” development.

On the other hand, I found the explanation about the advantages of distributed version control systems (dVCS) in the enterprise quite good. A few of the great aspects of the article are:

  • There is an excellent description of how peer-to-peer development can boost productivity

  • Some of the bad things about using the One True Central place for all commits are described, without falling for the temptation to bad mouth Subversion too much

  • Merge tracking is described in passing, and some of the reasons why it is a Good Thing(TM) are listed

  • Bryan also mentions some of the pains of working in a really parallel style of development, with multiple active branches at the same time

  • A fairly objective description of what is good about Git and Mercurial is included; good points and potential shortcomings of both systems are listed

I really liked his post.

Thanks, Bryan


Mercurial teaser

11 Nov 2007, 18:23 by Giorgos Keramidas

How fast can you push changesets to your colleagues if you are using a client-server based SCM?

Mercurial (which is a distributed SCM), when changes are pushed over an NFS-shared filesystem, can push 24 changes, with 81 patches, affecting 54 files, in less than 0.3 sec:

    gker@freya ...
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Automated workspace updates with Mercurial

06 Sep 2007, 15:34 by Giorgos Keramidas

When using a distributed SCM, it is often very useful to be able to automatically sync a “reference” workspace with a remote, “parent” workspace. This way, even when offline, a local clone of the parent workspace is available.

Having a local clone of the “reference tree” is useful in many ...

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