[Python-Dev] PEP 374 (DVCS) now in reST

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Paul Hummer <paul at eventuallyanyway.com> wrote:
> At a previous employer, we had this same discussion about switching to a DVCS,
> and the time and cost required to learn the new tool.  We switched to bzr, and
> while there were days where someone got lost in the DVCS, the overall
> advantages with merging allowed that cost to be offset by the fact that merging
> was so cheap (and we merged a lot).
>
> That's a big consideration to be made when you're considering a DVCS.  Merges
> in SVN and CVS can be painful, where merging well is a core feature of any
> DVCS.

I hear you. I for one have been frustrated (now that you mention it)
by the inability to track changes across merges. We do lots of merges
from the trunk into the py3k branch, and the merge revisions in the
branch quotes the full text of the changes merged from the trunk, but
not the list of affected files for each revision merged. Since merges
typically combine a lot of revisions, it is very painful to find out
more about a particular change to a file when that change came from
such a merge -- often even after reading through the entire list of
descriptions you still have no idea which merged revision is
responsible for a particular change. Assuming this problem does not
exist in DVCS, that would be a huge bonus from switching to a DVCS!

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)