[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Bjorn Wijers]

Although I think that most of the issues I have* with the current 
WordPress development model are not going to be solved with a different 
version control system, I too would welcome distributed version control 
over Subversion.

Personally I like Bazaar (http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/).
It's quite well supported on all major platforms (Windows, Linux and 
OSX) with a nice gui and offers imho a well thought out work-flow. Oh 
and it is nicely integrated with Launchpad(). Bonus points for all of 
this being open source software :)

* For those interested: my issues with the current development model or 
why I sometime ago stopped participating in core related work:

1) No clear guidelines on how the WordPress community may participate in 
the decision process and direction of WordPress
2) no clear guidelines on how one may become a core committer
3) No roadmap as far as I can see
4) Arbitrary and unclear (at least to me) way of handling tickets and 
patches

Bonus: No mandatory brackets for control structures...C'mon that's just 
plain silly.

Feel free to enlighten me if some of these points have already been 
addressed,

Grtz
BjornW

On 12/09/2010 08:51 PM, Eric Mann wrote:
> The advantage of using GIT (or Mercurial, or any other distributed system)
> is that you can develop and commit locally, not just to a central
> repository.
>
> Take this workflow:
>
>     - You start working on a patch for a small feature and spend a couple of
>     hours swimming through code
>     - You go out to dinner, do something else, and get wrapped up in another
>     project
>     - You come back to your patch a week later and work a bit more
>     - You work some more a day or two later
>     - Then you discover that the small feature is really a major overhaul to
>     an existing system, so you buckle down and work even hard
>     - When you're just about done, you realize you've made a mistake - adding
>     new feature B somehow broke feature A ... but you aren't quite sure what you
>     did to break it or, more importantly, when.
>
> With SVN on a dedicated repository, it's easy to just revert changes and
> track down your bug.  Core committers to WordPress have access to this and
> seem to use it (I see the occasional reversion ... we're not perfect).  But
> other developers in the community don't.  And that's where Git helps.  With
> the current SVN system, if I stumble upon a bug and try to track down where
> I broke the code, I have no revision history to track against because I'm
> not actually working with the WordPress repository.  With Git, though, I
> have a local copy and I'm constantly committing my changes to that - if I
> see something broken, I can track down a specific revision and fix it.
>
> That's the value of Git.
>
> Basic workflow comparison -
>
> SVN:
>
>     - Update working copy
>     - Write code
>     - Write code
>     - Write code
>     - Export patch to someone else
>     - Patch accepted and committed
>
> Git:
>
>     - Clone repository
>     - Write code
>     - Commit
>     - Write code
>     - Commit
>     - Write code
>     - Commit
>     - Request that someone else pulls your changes
>     - Changes are committed
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Otto<otto at ottodestruct.com>  wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Otto<otto at ottodestruct.com>  wrote:
>>> For the record, I don't get git. I find it confusing and difficult to
>> use.
>>
>> BTW, I agree with nacin that this is most likely a matter of the
>> associated tools just not being up to par yet. SVN has been around a
>> long time, while GIT is relatively new by comparison. The tools I've
>> seen to work with it are all difficult to use and the weird use of
>> terminology I don't understand (because I don't understand the git
>> workflow in the first place) makes them difficult and confusing. If
>> the tools were better, and the terminology was explained well, then
>> maybe it would make more sense to me.
>>
>> -Otto
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