Re: can subversion 1.6 be made "just as distributed as git"?

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 4, 2010, 09:35 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTin1R8+N=TG2fhc1UdzT6G65JB1awrw+Q8xY7uBA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20101104T014408-903@post.gmane.org>

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 01:45, MDellerus <mdellerus@yahoo.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I have a co-worker who has suggested that, using "svnadmin hotcopy",
> subversion can be just as "distributed" a system as Git
>
> While I see how this can be done, it hardly seems to me to qualify as "just as",
> making this "plausible" at best.
>
> Can anyone give me a quick confirmation of this?  Confirmed? Plausible? Busted?
>
> If this is confirmed or plausible, could someone give me a quick run-down?

The problem here seems to be that your coworker took "distributed" literally.

When we talk about "distributed version control systems" we don't just mean that the raw copy of the complete revision history is distributed (although that's also included).

If that was the case packing up the ,v files on a CVS server or distributing a "svnadmin dump" would give you that FTP-archive-like distribution.

"Distributed" means that you can easily share the complete revision history with yourself/others and *put it back together again*. E.g. a workflow I had yesterday was:

 1. Clone a "master" repo
 2. Hack it on my laptop, thinking it worked
 3. Push my revisions to deployment server #1, made & commited some hotfixes
 4. Synced those to deployment server #2, made & commited some more fixes
 5. Synced those back to my laptop
 6. Synced them back upstream

If a workflow like that isn't any harder than commiting to one "master" repository you have a distributed system. You *could* do that with SVK using some massive hacks, but it would quickly fall down when you have multiple parties with diverging histories that you need to join.