On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Eric Hopper <hopper@omnifarious.org> wrote:
There are lots of different versions of Boost that have been released and are installed on the various systems I work on. Not only that, but regardless of whether or not Boost ever accepts my changes I want to keep them locally so I will always be able to have a version of Boost with my changes.
Have you heard of vendor-branches? They are a bit of an hassle, I have to agree though.
[...] If Boost had used a distributed version control system from the very beginning, that previous 6 paragraphs could've been condensed down to a couple of paragraphs. And future merges with Boost would generally be pretty trivial unless the random library changed significantly.
I agree.
The ability to fork is absolutely central to Open Source. It's harder to fork when you lose the history and ability to track changes against the original because a project's history and ability to track your changes to it is as important as a dump of the source code at a moment in time, if not more so. Distributed source control avoids these problems and makes forking easier, almost trivial. Distributed source control therefor fits the Open Source model better.
I guess that's one of the main points to consider.
In my opinion, distributed source control is the best fit for almost any development. But that's just my opinion, and I don't have nearly as much in the way of hard logical argument to back that up. I just know that I've used source control for nearly (and I'm rather embarassed that the word 'nearly' is there, but a 17 yr old in 1988 isn't likely to have heard of source control) as long as I've been a professional programmer. And distributed source control systems are the first source control systems I've used where I didn't feel like I was spending a lot of time fighting the source control system because it didn't work the way I needed it to. Discipline does not always require pain.
The reason I asked foremost is that we (our company) are considering to move to an distributed version control system and are currently in the step of acquiring pros/cons. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Best regards, Christoph