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

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 03:12, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> No, software engineering scales up to a point, then it breaks and you
> need a serialization scheme.  The problem is not the DVCS, it's the
> demand for a *centralized*, authoritative, safe, stable version.  DVCS
> can scale at least to Linux kernel pace if you only ask for
> centralized authoritative.<wink>  DVCS is "No Silver Bullet", it only
> helps with some accidental costs of development.  It doesn't help with
> the costs of review and testing.

Yeah, Linux employs the other solution here (which Mercurial also
uses, in fact, for development of Mercurial itself): only one person
pushes to the central repository, that person pulls from other
"staging" repositories as he is aware of changes being made.

> There are in fact problems with the current generation of DVCSes.
> Lack of plists on commits, for example.  You'd like to have a "tested"
> property, in fact two of them (one for the committer, one for the
> buildbots).  You'd like to have a "checkpoint" property, which commits
> would by default be ignored by "log" and "bisect".  You'd like to have
> an "issues" property, a list of issues applicable to this commit.  But
> again, these would only reduce accidental costs.

Mercurial does in fact have a mechanism to attach arbitrary metadata
to changesets (the extra dictionary), but there's no easy access from
the command-line. One could also argue that this is basically just a
special case of smart commit message formatting, which python-dev
already does, and could extend. (For example, Mozilla sometimes closes
their tree to general commits, but then has a CLOSED tag that can be
put in a commit message to override that.)

Cheers,

Dirkjan