[OT] DVCS

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:42:32 +0300, Russel Winder <russel at russel.org.uk>  
wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 10:20 -0700, Bill Baxter wrote:
>> I'm not a huge fan of Bazaar :-p ,
>
> Hummm... May I ask why?

Could someone please explain to me why is a VCS other than the three big  
ones (SVN, Git and HG) is worth using for an open-source project such as  
this?

I have never used Bazaar, DARCS and Monotone, and only briefly used HG,  
and I acknowledge that they may be better than Git in some aspects.  
However, IMHO, one of the main decisions for a VCS for a public project is  
its accessibility. SVN is the most popular one, but it's pretty  
established that SVN isn't anywhere as productive as DVCSes, and obviously  
it can't be used in a distributed manner.

If I'd consider contributing to an open-source project using a VCS I'm  
unfamiliar with, it's quite likely that I'd get turned off by the hurdle  
of downloading, installing and learning to use the respective VCS.

Russel wrote in another, unrelated thread:
> Of course using BitBucket or Launchpad may well be more likely to get
> support as Mercurial and Bazaar are so much more usable that Git.

I'm sorry, but to me that sounds like a biased personal opinion stated as  
if it was an objective fact :( I seriously doubt that any project would  
get more "support" if it used an obscure (albeit possibly better in some  
ways) DVCS, unless the intended audience for the project's contributors is  
already familiar with that DVCS. Maybe Bazaar etc. is more popular with  
EMACS users/hackers?

Also, I think that it's pretty hard to beat the workflow that GitHub  
facilitates for open-source projects (with one-click forking and pull  
requests).

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net