[Python-Dev] Looking for VCS usage scenarios

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Gustavo Niemeyer writes:

 > Both arguments strike me as odd.

I'm an odd fellow, what can I say?

 > Having the *option* to leave your history on the server shouldn't
 > be a problem, right?

Only if you later try to use it.<wink>

 > The same goes for (1): having more ways to use the tool isn't
 > exactly a problem.

It isn't exactly a good thing, either: TOOWDTI.

However, my intent was simply to respond to Brett, who mentioned that
one consideration for a VCS for Python is simplicity/ease of use for
occasional contributors, and proliferation of commands and styles is
not conducive to that.  Bazaar suffers from this problem although in a
different way and lesser degree compared to git.

 > How large?  Which repositories?  Which operations?  Which version
 > of Bazaar?

I'm not going to go there; this has been discussed exhaustively on the
bazaar at canonical.com list, as well as on lists of projects considering
adoption of bazaar.  You should look in their archives for the
results, where you will also find the discussion of the importance of
the results and plans to address problems by the developers.

Here again I'm simply responding to Brett who is under the impression
that all dVCSes can scale.  At present, bzr is one that cannot; the
user must accept far worse performance, across all operations, than is
available with the competing dVCSes, and the perception gets worse
with scale.

 > In case Bazaar is a good deal for Python nowadays, it should only
 > get better over time.

This is true.  Performance is not everything to everyone.  Most Bazaar
users don't care at all; they say things like "who cares about a few
seconds in bzr log when it gets the merge right almost every time".
But we don't yet know that most Python core developers will feel the
same way, and it simply is not appropriate at this point in time to
dismiss performance concerns with "oh, I'm sure they all can scale."