Moving to D

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 20:20 -0600, Caligo wrote:

< . . . ignoring all the plagiarism rubbish which has been dealt with by
others . . . >

> There is also Gitorious.  It only offers free hosting and it is more
> team orientated than Github, but Github has recently added the
> "Organization" feature.   The interesting thing about Gitorious is
> that you can run it on your own server.  I don't think you can do that
> with Github.

I have never used Gitorious (though I do have an account).  My
experience is limited to GitHub, BitBucket, GoogleCode, and Launchpad.
The crucial difference between GitHub and BitBucket on the one hand and
Launchpad on the other is that Launchpad supports teams as well as
individuals.  GoogleCode enforces teams and doesn't support individuals
at all so doesn't really count.

Where SourceForge and all the other sit these days is I guess a moot
point. 

> One cool thing about Github that I like is gist:
> https://gist.github.com/  
> It's a pastebin, but it uses Git and supports D syntax.  People are
> always sharing snippets on these newsgroups, and it would have been
> nice if they were gists.  

Personally I have never used these things, nor found a reason to do so.

> I've never used Bazaar, so no comment on that.  But, between Git and
> Mercurial, I vote for Git.

Mercurial and Git are very similar in so many ways, though there are
some crucial differences (the index in Git being the most obvious, but
for me the most important is remote tracking branches).  Bazaar has a
completely different core model.

Sadly, fashion and tribalism tend to play far too important a role in
all discussions of DVCS -- I note no-one has mentioned Darcs or Monotone
yet!  And recourse to argument about number of projects using a given
DVCS are fatuous.  What matters is the support for VCS in the tool chain
and the workflow.

It is undoubtedly the case that Git and Mercurial currently have the
most support across the board, though Canonical are trying very hard to
make Bazaar a strong player -- sadly they are focusing too much on
Ubuntu and not enough on Windows to stay in the game for software
developers, no support for Visual Studio.

Anecdotal experience seems to indicate that Mercurial has a more
average-developer-friendly use model -- though there are some awkward
corners.  Despite a huge improvement to Git over the last 3 years, it
still lags Mercurial on this front.  However, worrying about the average
developer is more important for companies and proprietary work than it
is for FOSS projects -- where the skill set appears to be better than
average.

All in all it is up to the project lead to make a choice and for
everyone else to live with it.  I would advise Walter to shift to one of
Mercurial or Git, but if he wants to stick with Subversion -- and suffer
the tragic inability to sanely work with branches -- that is his choice.

As any Git/Mercurial/Bazaar user knows, Git, Mercurial and Bazaar can
all be used as Subversion clients.  However without creating a proper
bridge these clients cannot be used in a DVCS peer group because of the
rebasing that is enforced -- at least by Git and Mercurial, Bazaar has a
mode of working that avoids the rebasing and so the Subversion
repository appears as a peer in the DVCS peer group.

Perhaps the interesting models to consider are GoogleCode that chose to
support Mercurial and Subversion, and Codehaus that chose to support Git
and Subversion (using Gitosis).  Of course DSource already support all
three.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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