Moving to D

[Don]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Caligo" <iteronvexor at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:mailman.451.1294306555.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:28 AM, Walter Bright
>>> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's pretty much what I'm afraid of, losing my grip on how the whole
>>>> thing works if there are multiple dmd committers.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps using a modern SCM like Git might help?  Everyone could have 
>>>> (and
>>> should have) commit rights, and they would send pull requests.  You 
>>> or one
>>> of the managers would then review the changes and pull and merge with 
>>> the
>>> main branch.  It works great; just checkout out Rubinius on Github to 
>>> see
>>> what I mean: https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure I see how that's any different from everyone having 
>> "create and submit a patch" rights, and then having Walter or one of 
>> the managers review the changes and merge/patch with the main branch.
> 
> I don't, either.

There's no difference if you're only making one patch, but once you make 
more, there's a significant difference. I can generally manage to fix 
about five bugs at once, before they start to interfere with each other. 
After that, I have to wait for some of the bugs to be integrated into 
the trunk, or else start discarding changes from my working copy.

Occasionally I also use my own DMD local repository, but it doesn't work 
very well (gets out of sync with the trunk too easily, because SVN isn't 
  really set up for that development model).

I think that we should probably move to Mercurial eventually. I think 
there's potential for two benefits:
(1) quicker for you to merge changes in;
(2) increased collaboration between patchers.

But due to the pain in changing the developement model, I don't think 
it's a change we should make in the near term.