[Numpy-discussion] DVCS at PyCon

[Bruce Southey]

David Cournapeau wrote:
> Hi Travis,
>
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Travis E. Oliphant
> <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
>   
>> FYI from PyCon
>>
>> Here at PyCon, it has been said that Python will be moving towards DVCS
>> and will be using bzr or mecurial, but explicitly *not* git.   It would
>> seem that *git* got the "lowest" score in the Developer survey that
>> Brett Cannon did.
>>     
>
> It is interesting how those tools are viewed so differently in
> different communities. I am too quite doubtful about the validity of
> those surveys :)
>
>   
>> The reasons seem to be:
>>
>>  * git doesn't have good Windows clients
>>     
>
> Depending on what is meant by good windows client (GUI, IDE
> integration), it is true, but then neither do bzr or hg have good
> clients, so I find this statement a bit strange. What is certainly
> true is that git developers care much less about windows than bzr (and
> hg ?). For example, I would guess git will never care much about case
> insensitive fs, etc... (I know bzr developers worked quite a bit on
> this).
>
>   
>>  * git is not written with Python
>>     
>
> I can somewhat understand why it matters to python, but does it matter to us ?
>
> There are definitely strong arguments against git - but I don't think
> being written in python is a strong one. The lack of a good window
> support is a good argument against changing from svn, but very
> unconvincing compared to other tools. Git has now so much more
> manpower compared to hg and bzr (many more project use it: the list of
> visible projects using git is becoming quite impressive) - from a 3rd
> party POV, I think git is much better set up than bzr and hg. Gnome
> choosing git could be significant (they made the decision a couple of
> days ago).
>
>   
>> I think the sample size was pretty small to be making decisions on
>> (especially when most opinions where "un-informed").
>>     
>
> Most people just choose the one they first use. Few people know
> several DVCS. Pauli and me started a page about arguments pro/cons git
> - it is still very much work in progress:
>
> http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/wiki/GitMigrationProposal
>
> Since few people are willing to try different systems, we also started
> a few workflows (compared to svn):
>
> http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/wiki/GitWorkflow
>
> FWIW, I have spent some time to look at converting svn repo to git,
> with proper conversion of branches, tags, and other things. I have
> converted my own scikits to git as a first trial (I have numpy
> converted as well, but I did not put it anywhere to avoid confusion).
> This part of the problem would be relatively simple to handle.
>
> cheers,
>
> David
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>   
It is now official that Python will switch to Mercurial (Hg):
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/102706

Not that it directly concerns me, but this is rather surprising given:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/

Hopefully more details will be provided in the near future.

Bruce