[Python-Dev] I am now lost - committed, pulled, merged, what is "collapse"?

[Tres Seaver]

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On 03/21/2011 10:55 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> skip at pobox.com writes:
> 
>  > I believe it runs counter to the professed intention of the switch
>  > away from a centralized version control system, to make it easier
>  > for more people to contribute to Python.  It certainly seems harder
>  > for this old dog.
> 
> Well, you may be an old dog, but you're also an early adopter.  That
> means both that you get to pay for our mistakes (our = authors of PEPs
> 374 and 385), and that it's going to take a while to disentangle
> implementation issues from the real long-run costs and benefits.
> 
> Costs of transition were admitted up front.  The professed intention
> was to make things *harder* in the short run (but as little as
> possible!), while making contribution to Python significantly more
> attractive (but not necessarily less work!) in the long run.

In our experience with migrating pyramid and repoze components from SVN
to github, the real wins come not from merging changes inside a
repository but in making it dirt-simple for people *wihtout commit
privileges* to give me trivial-to-merge patches (via a public fork).  I
pooh-poohed that advantage at last year's PyCon when people were urging
us to move to github / bitbucket;  by this year's conference, I have
cheerfully eaten my words.

As the developer working inside the "main" repository, I don't find git
/ hg / bzr much easier to use than svn.  Because I care about projects
using all three, I have to know all three, while still keeping up svn
chops:  I find that mental overhead annoying.

>  I don't
> think anybody tried to hide the fact that changing habits would be
> required, or to claim that it would be costless.  There were a few
> people with a Pollyanna "try it, you'll like it" attitude, but
> certainly those of us involved in PEP 374 knew better than that -- we
> knew there were people like you whose patterns of contribution worked
> just fine with the svn-based workflow and didn't need or want to
> change.  That's why PEP 374 was necessary!
> 
> Yes, based on the description you give of your principal contribution
> pattern, you take a complexity/effort hit in the transition.  I think
> it can be alleviated quite a bit with the help of your reports, but
> that will take some time.  All I can say about that time is "Sorry!"
> and "Thank you for trying the system while it's still in beta."
> 
> I hope you will give it some more time to shake down.

The "push race" problem in hg definitely bit us at PyCon this year while
sprinting to get WebOb's test coverage to 100% (preparing for the
Python3 port).  I haven't seen that issue so much with git or bzr, but I
may not have used them in such a race-friendly environment (ten or
eleven developers working in parallel on the WebOb test modules).


Tres.
- -- 
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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