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On Jan 3, 2009, at 10:52 AM, Victor Stinner wrote:
A little offtopic: it seems to me it is a flaw of svn, that it encourages the model of two classes of developers, those with a commit access (first class) and those without it (second class).
Yes, that's the problem. Is it not possible to have finer permission (instead of boolean permission: commit or not commit)? Eg. give commit access but only for a file or a directory? It looks like Tarek Ziade is now allowed to commit, but only on distutils. I like such permission because nobody knows the whole Python project, it's too huge for a single brain ;-)
Well, except for Guido and Tim maybe :)
Python does have finer grain permissions, but it's strictly by convention. We /could/ have technical means to control those permissions, but it's never been worth the effort before.
your main point is that using bugtracker for committing patches is very painful (I agree)
No, my point is that some patches stay too long in the tracker. GIT, Mercurial or anything else are a little bit better than the tracker (the patches can be synchronized with upstream), but the goal is to be part of the upstream code base.
A distributed VCS is useful to test huge changes. Performance improvment on integers (patches to optimize the multiplication, use base 2^30 instead of 2^15, etc.) would benefit from such tools, because cooperative work is easier.
A DVCS has lots and lots of benefits. One that I like a lot is that it will be much easier for people to maintain such bigger branches while still tracking changes to the trunk. And a DVCS like Bazaar supports bundles which are essentially super-patches that contain all the meta data that a real branch would have. So a bzr bundle would be a fine thing to attach to a tracker issue, and it would be much more alive than a plain old patch.
- -Barry