DMD needs branches

[Bill Baxter]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Nicolas J., el 15 de abril a las 13:51 me escribiste:
>> Nicolai Waniek Wrote:
>>> You don't need real branches for that, you may even just copy the source files
>>> from one directory to another, but having a backend like SVN doing it will save
>>> you lots of work to be done (e.g. you could share some source files through all
>>> branches when you're certain that they won't get changed).
>> Unfortunately, because it doesn't keep track of history, SVN is not very good at merging, so that it gives a little more work for the maintenance of several parallel branches, even though it still reduces the work of reporting patches by maybe 80%.
>>
>> More powerful tools like darcs and mercurial reduce the number of merge conflicts (and therefore manual work) greatly. darcs has a very interesting concept of dependencies between patches that allow to undo a patch easily: i.e it is possible to remove a patch and the SCM will remove all the patches that were dependent on it.
>>
>> Decentralized SCM like those ones are better suited to open source software than centralized SCM (CVS, SVN, Clearcase...) because one doesn't need to connect to the central server to be able to work. In this model, each developer has a complete local copy of the central repository, so that he can work offline. He only connects to it to synchronize, so this model scales better than the centralized model.
> 
> The problem with darcs it's it doesn't scale very well (because of
> implementation issues, they say). I love darcs for small projects, but
> (sadly) it's not really suitable for big ones yet.
> 
> Another great (distributed) SCM is git, done by Linus Tolvards for
> maintaing the Linux kernel (a really big project, as you know, so it
> scales by design).
> 

Grr.  Why do we have to have *four* credible competitors to svn all the 
sudden? (Mercurial, Git, Darcs, Monotone)  When SVN came out it was a no 
brainer.  Better than CVS: check.  Anything else better than CVS and 
still free?  Nope.  Ok, SVN it is then!  But now we have to deal with 
*four* credible challengers to SVN.  Can somebody please tell me which 
three of those projects are destined for the also-ran bucket so I don't 
have to waste any time learning them?

[Mostly kidding -- choice is great, competition is great.  I just wish 
there were one that blew the others so totally out of the water that it 
would be a no-brainer]

:-)