[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[Charles R Harris]

On Jan 4, 2008 12:52 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 4, 2008 12:21 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I understand the "sumpy uses it" reason, it is definitely a factor.
> > But I would rather have a more thorough study on the merits of each
> > system. For example, being a user of bzr for a year and a half now, I
> > think I have a pretty good idea on how it works, and its advantages.
> > We could then decide on a set of attributes to compare, and people who
> > knows about one tool could then tell about it.
> >
> > Performances-wise, hg and bzr really are comparable nowadays for
> > common, local operations. I don't think it is a relevant parameter for
> > the hg vs bzr choice anymor, specially for scipy/numpy which are small
> > projects (I have bzr imports of scipy and scikits, so I can give some
> > numbers if you need them). Third party tools, special abilities (svn
> > import, storage efficiency, special commands, etc...) are more
> > important I think
>
> Absolutely.  That's why I said above "when the choice is a sound one
> on technical merit alone".  At the time (for sage/sympy) the bzr/hg
> choice was unmistakably in favor of hg.  Things might be different
> today.
>
> Incidentally, the emacs guys seem to be worrying about the same thing:
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/85893
>
> If they actually do the work of comparing tools, that work may be
> useful for us.  I'm pretty sure that any tool that can handle the
> entire history of emacs can chew on numpy/scipy/ipython/matplotlib
> *combined* for breakfast.
>

A quick google for benchmarks show that a year ago,  hg was a bit faster and
generated smaller repositories than bzr, but I don't think the difference is
enough to matter. Git is 10-20 times faster than either for a lot of things,
but Linus was definitely focused on speed, which is easy to understand if
you look at the churn in the kernel. Anyway, I suspect that, technically,
both bzr and hg are suitable choices. I'm not sure esr correct that it is
unlikely that both are going to last long term, bazaar (the ancestor of bzr)
is used for Ubuntu. But the two are similar and fill the same niche, so I
expect that one or the other will become dominant in the wild. And hg seems
to have the advantage of a head start and not being as tightly tied to
Linux.

Chuck
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