[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[Ondrej Certik]

> Imagine the pain in the other direction, which was my experience :) I
> actually did not believe at first that it was so bad, and thought I was
> doing something wrong. At least, it certainly convinced me that SVN was
> not easier than DVCS.

It would made me sick. :)

> I am not familiar with sympy: you are not using trac at all ? Also, how

We use googlecode:

http://code.google.com/p/sympy/

it works nice for us.

> did you convert the svn history ?

using the mercurial extension. Kirill submitted some patches, so that
also branches are converted
and tags too.

> I like the mercurial's way of showing branches and co; bzr does not have
> anything like that out of the box (there are separate projects to show
> sources; there is also launchpad of course, but since it is not open
> source, I do not even consider it for numpy/scipy).
>
> On the other hand, the bzr community is more user-friendly: the tool is
> easier to use I think, the graphical tools are more advanced, at least
> from my experience.

I never used bzr, so I cannot judge.

> > We were basically only deciding between git and Mercurial, but we
> > chose mercurial, because
> >
> > * we are python guys and Mercurial is in python+C, very nicely written
> > and they accept patches (Kirill, one sympy developer, has posted
> > several already, to implement features he was missing - he used to use
> > darcs before)
> > * Sage uses it
> For some time, the big problem of bzr was speed. But bzr accomplished
> quite a lot the last year: the first time I used mercurial, the speed
> difference was obvious; it is not so true anymore (they 'feel' the same,
> basically, but I have not used mercurial extensively, at least compared
> to bzr).
>
> So I think it really boils down to the difficulty of the transition, the
> availability of third party tools (and also the tool used by other
> projects similar to numpy, as you mentionned).

I know that bzr is used by Canonical, but I think socially, you should
choose either
mercurial or git. Those are imho the most widespread DVCS.

As I said, Mercurial being Python+C was very important for us,
so that we can easily fix bugs and implement new functionality in mercurial.

Also the commands of mercurial are very similar to svn.


Ondrej