[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Mike Little]

On 11 December 2010 15:54, Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name> wrote:

> ... Whereas with SVN this is a PITA to do and
> handle, it is a feature that is built into distributed VCS.
>
> ... By SVNs very nature it does
> not want you to branch except for the most extreme situations.
>
>
I don't think I've heard such inaccuracies about Subversion for quite a
while! Subversion has branching at the very heart of its design like any
good VCS should. One of the driving forces behind the development of
Subversion was to address some of the problems with branching in CVS.
One area in particular: branching in subversion is a fixed-cost 'cheap'
operation (contrary to some other inaccurate info I saw on this thread in
passing).

But, as I tried to say before in my earlier message on this thread, the
point is moot.

Whilst the development of WordPress is *not* distributed (and it is not) and
whilst the final result of all contributions is hand application of a patch
by the few core committers, there will never be any need, let alone
advantage, to switching away from Subversion.

Git and it's friends might work really well for distributed Bazaar-like
development, but WordPress uses the Cathedral model.

Meanwhile, as has been mentioned on this thread, anyone can take a copy of
the repository from subversion into Git and work with it that way, but, in
the end, you still need to produce a patch to give to the team.

Mike
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/