[bind10-dev] git or hg

[Nathanael Hoyle]

On 5/7/2010 6:51 AM, Jelte Jansen wrote:
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> On 05/06/2010 11:41 PM, Francis Dupont wrote:
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>>>> As far as I know git is not (no longer in fact) open source.
>>>>          
>> =>  perhaps it is a confusion with bitkeeper which was used for Linux
>> sources. According to my Gentoo packages, the git server is open source
>>      
> yup, iirc, Linux used to use Bitkeeper even though it wasn't free
> software, and that backfired when they stopped allowing free-of-charge
> use of it. That prompted the creation of git, which is completely free.
> There's quite an interesting lesson in that story btw :)
>
>    
>> (in http://www.git-scm.com/) and mercurial too (in
>> http://mercurial.selenic.com/). BTW there is Bazaar too, it seems
>> each guy who has a strong opinion wrote his own tool (:-) (*).
>>
>>      
> another lesson in there, this time on the culture behind open source :)
>
>    
>> PS: (*) it is *not* a call to write another one!
>>      
> lol, i would certainly not hope so.
>
> I agree with Michaels proposal. I have a small personal unfounded
> preference for git, but no real arguments for or against either; I
> haven't used either of them.
>
> Jelte
>    

Since the question first came up a few weeks ago, and in large part 
because someone mentioned Joel Spolsky's endorsement of Mercurial (I've 
read one of his books, and generally find his conclusions to be very 
well reasoned, even in the few cases where I disagree with him), I 
downloaded and started using Mercurial initially on a trial basis.  I 
imported an existing subversion repository from a project I've been 
working on for several years. I'll admit it did take me a few hours to 
feel like I knew what I was doing, but I must say that I love the 
freedom with which I can branch and remerge without complicated hassles. 
I actual found myself coding for a much longer stretch than I had 
planned to, simply because of how liberating it was to truly feel like I 
could just change it around radically and rely on my version control. 
I've since done a couple small projects at work using it, and find that 
it works really well for small things that you wouldn't go creating a 
new repository on a subversion server for, but if you were going to have 
it in a directory on your machine anyway, now it can be a 
version-controlled directory.

I have not used Git (git?) at this point. In another lesson of software 
culture, I was bitten pretty badly when Linus decided to ditch the 
even/odd-numbered kernel releases having meaning as development and 
stable. I've specifically encountered serious bugs in the scheduler code 
that caused major headaches that were the result of un-regression-tested 
commits to the main tree. There was no "stable" version available; the 
fix I was told at the time after posting all my analysis on the Linux 
Kernel Mailing List was that I should upgrade the bleeding-edge 
"I-just-committed-it-30-seconds-ago" sources and it "might be better". 
That has made me a little hesitant of late to go with software projects 
conceived and implemented and run by Linus. (Not intending to take away 
from what he's done, or how great Linux is, or start flame wars... I'd 
be personally afraid to commit a large code base to git however.)

-Nathanael