[OT] DVCS

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:31:49 +0300, Gour <gour at atmarama.net> wrote:

> I think that any capable developer can quickly grasp any of the
> 'standard' (bzr,hg,git,mtn) DVCS-es (darcs is a little bit different
> considering it's patch-oriented) and can do:
> dvcs init; dvcs pull; dvcs commit; dvcs push;
> easily.

IIRC even those commands differ across these DVCSes. Anyway, when you want  
to do something non-trivial (branching/merging/history editing) you're  
forced to consult the documentation.

> Can you explain more about this 'hard to beat workflow' which is not
> supported by other DVCS-es mentioned above?

It's not really about Git, it's about GitHub:

1. Repo creation is instant, doesn't need to go through a human approval  
process, etc. (big turn-off from DSource, SourceForge as I create and work  
on many small projects)
2. One-click forking - self-explanatory, you get a cheap clone of a  
project in your own namespace, to which you can push to to instantly  
publish your changes.
3. Pull requests - pretty self-explanatory, but integrated with the issue  
system.
4. You've probably seen one of GitHub's "network chart"?
( e.g.: http://github.com/jquery/jquery/network )
You can instantly see activity of all of the project's forks on GitHub.  
This allows easily finding nice forks to merge / cherry-pick. If you're  
lazy, you don't even need to send your patches upstream - as long as you  
don't change the license, the project maintainers can cherry-pick from  
your fork as long as you push them to your fork. Personally, I think this  
feature is revolutionary, and quite "hard to beat" compared to the  
oldschool approach of mailing lists etc. ;)

GitHub has other nice things, such as line-level commit comments, as well  
as the usual things you'll find in many other open-source project hosters  
(issues, wiki, HTML project homepage).

And finally, IMHO a pretty convincing argument is that GitHub is one of  
the most popular open-source hosting websites. Not having to register and  
familiarize yourself with a project hosting website lowers the  
contribution barrier even lower.

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