[opensource-dev] Snowglobe Mecurial Repository

Jacek Antonelli jacek.antonelli at gmail.com
Fri Mar 19 13:47:39 PDT 2010


On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com> wrote:
> Actually, I think I understand why.
>
> LL is using hg internally, and has been for a while.
> They just pushed things out as svn for public access, but that process
> caused all the meta data to be lost and had to be done manually, and
> therefore only sometimes in big large chunks.
>
> It is for the benefit of snowglobe that commits to the internal
> repository are available with meta data and as the original change sets,
> once they are merged with the public repository.
>
> With hg this is possible: just push the changeset to the "public
> hg repository", but only if that public repository run hg itself.
>
> On top of that, merging branches is much easier (according to
> http://hginit.com/00.html), that holds for merging changes from internal
> into snowglobe but also for TPV's assuming they switch to hg as well.
> It should become much easier for us and for others using hg to merge
> 'upstream' changes with the ever growning set of local patches and
> extensions.

Yep, I would guess those are all some of LL's reasons for switching
away from SVN.

Also, speaking from my experience using SVN for several years before
switching to Git (which is close enough to Hg), using a distributed
version control system just changes the way you work, and the way you
think about version control and software development. Personally, I
think that mental shift is even more important than the new features
and tools and easy merges (which are also very nice, of course).

Think of the old lock-based systems, where one team member would
"check out" a file, and no one else could edit it until they were
done. Once people switched to systems like CVS or SVN that let all the
developers keep working without blocking each other (as much), it
really altered and improved how software was developed and how teams
worked together. Distributed systems take this to the next step, and
again it alters and improves the way developers work and collaborate.

Plus everything's just way faster. :-D I never realized how much time
I spent waiting for a SVN commit to finish -- or even checking the log
-- until I used Git. Now I'm completely spoiled, and waiting 10
seconds to contact the server just to look at the log, or 30 seconds
(or even minutes (!) for big changes) to commit feels like an eternity
to me. It may seem like a little thing, but it feels so much nicer
when nearly every operation is near-instantaneous.

- Jacek


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