[Numpy-discussion] DVCS at PyCon

[Ondrej Certik]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 12:43 AM, Eric Firing <efiring at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> Ondrej Certik wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 10:45 PM, David Cournapeau
>> <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>>> Ondrej Certik wrote:
>>>> It is maybe easier to learn how to work with different clones, but
>>>> once you start working with lots of patches and you need to reclone
>>>> all the time, then it's the wrong approach to work, as it takes lots
>>>> of time to copy the whole repository on the disk.
>
> This is simply wrong.  Mercurial uses hard links for cloning a repo that

On my laptop, recloning the whole repository (with hardlinks) takes
considerably longer than creating a new branch in the same directory,
that's a pure fact.

> is on the same disk, so it is faster and much more space-efficient than
> copying the files. But if you do want named branches in a given repo,
> you can have that also with hg.  Granted, it has not always been part of
> hg, but it is now.  Same with rebasing and transplanting.

As far as I know mercurial doesn't have interactive rebase. Besides,
the default package in Ubuntu Jaunty doesn't even have the
(noninteractive) rebase enabled. So I think it will still take quite
some (lot?) of time until mercurial has all those tools available by
default.

>
> Now, I know that your (speaking to Ondrej) project switched from hg to
> git, and you have provided some useful insight as to why.  I also
> understand that there are substantive differences between the two, with
> advantages and disadvantages. But I don't think it follows that numpy
> (or matplotlib, eventually, I hope) necessarily should move to git

I never said numpy should move to git because I like git.

> if/when a move to a DVCS is decided upon.  It is possible that hg might
> be a better fit--a better compromise--for present *and* *potential*
> *future* contributors to numpy, scipy, and matplotlib.

Yes, it may be possible.

Ondrej