Re: VCS comparison table
- From
- Matthew D. Fuller <fullermd@over-yonder.net>
- Date
- Oct 22, 2006, 14:56 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20061022145658.GV75501@over-yonder.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <20061022102454.b9dea693.seanlkml@sympatico.ca>
On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 10:24:54AM -0400 I heard the voice of Sean, and lo! it spake thus:
> > Light goes on. Okay. So a bzr "branch" is only ever editable on a > single machine. So there is no distributed development on top of a > bzr "branch". Everyone else just has read-only copies of it.
Ah! Yes, that's exactly[0] right. Mark up another of those "so obvious we never think to state it" thought-patterns :|
Distributed development proper only happens on 'projects', not branches. In practice, we say "we're all working on branch X", in the sense that we use it as a base to work from and intend to merge our stuff into it, but strictly speaking we're all working on our own branches that just merge from/into X from time to time.
That's also why we use the phrases "merge from" and "merge to", rather than "merge WITH". Of course, where possible, we could 'fast-forward' to X rather than merge from it, at which point we'd then momentarily have exactly X, but culturally we don't seem to like doing that.
[0] There are a few very special-case exceptions, notably around the 'checkout' concept or where people are very carefully manually maintaining sync, but they're irrelevant in this case; and they ARE star-pattern developments that could be said to be 'centralized'. Now I grok where that's coming from.
--
Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.