[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Doug Stewart]

Otto:
SVN has always stunk at merging, and the Collab.net guys (and now Apache Foundation, I suppose) will readily admit that. It is a difficult matter. 


The problem is that you're still coming at this from an RCS/CVS/SVN "repo is king" mindset. I'm on my mobile, so I'll let the following link describe exactly what I mean:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43995/why-is-branching-and-merging-easier-in-mercurial-than-in-subversion

It's a mindjack at first, especially if you're used to an orderly hierarchy for changes, but once you glom onto the distributed mindset, it's really a game-changer. 

--
Doug Stewart

On Dec 10, 2010, at 12:44 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:38 PM, scribu <mail at scribu.net> wrote:
>> That's where your SVN mentality comes in, where merges are hard.
> 
> No. Merges are hard because *merges are hard*.
> 
> If two people change the same line, then somebody has to fix the line.
> Simple as that. A version control system can't fix that. This is code,
> not magic.
> 
> Even SVN can merge two different changesets that don't touch the same
> lines (but do touch the same files). I use this all the time. It works
> fine.
> 
>> No, as previously mentioned by someone else, a merge that doesn't work out
>> of the box would simply be marked as needs-refresh.
> 
> Sooo... how is this different then?
> 
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:41 PM, scribu <mail at scribu.net> wrote:
>> It's easier when you move code from one file to another, for example,
>> because git keeps track of that.
>> 
>> I had that problem when working on my GSoC project, which involved a lot of
>> moving code around.
> 
> I admit that that is a great improvement over SVN's purely single file
> based system. However, it seems like a fairly thin and uncommon case
> to me. Furthermore, this is basically an incremental improvement that
> is not based on the distributed nature of the version control system.
> 
> How does making the version control *distributed* improve the ability to merge?
> 
> -Otto
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