[Gnu-arch-users] Re: may I pick your brains?

[Miles Bader]

Dustin Sallings <address@hidden> writes:
> The bullet point, I suppose, would be ``offline development.''  It's
> difficult to explain to people who've never experienced such a thing,
> though.

Yeah, it is slightly hard to put things in `bullet point' terms[1].

My poor attempt:

  o Extremely cheap & easy archive (aka repository) creation: Archives
    are something ordinary users can easily create, without many
    privileges or special services.  Even a secure remote archive is
    often easy for a user to create and maintain without sysadmin privs!

  o Easy distributed development, especially `distributed branching' --
    you can make a branch off of _someone else's_ archive, even you
    only have read access, and doing so is very cheap.  Merging back
    and forth is easy once you've done this.

  o Very low bandwidth requirements for remote archives (esp. compared
    to CVS).

  o The usual modern source-control things:  proper atomic changesets,
    handling of renames/meta-info.

  o GPG-signed archives.

  o Wonderful treatment of branch-relationships and history via
    patch-logs -- much more useful than a rigid history tree.  This
    makes merging very nice: even if your development pattern is
    slightly unusual, there's enough info around that a good merge
    strategy can usually be found.

  o Raw archive is robust (files are _only_ added to an archive, never
    rewritten) and user-browsable with ordinary unix tools; no
    mysterious proprietary formats or fragile binary blobs.

Ok, more than 5 and not very well stated, but maybe there's an
organizing principle in there somewhere...

-Miles

[1] BTW, if you haven't yet invested your $7 in Edward Tufte's extremely
    attractive rant against powerpoint, do so with haste, it's a hoot:

       http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

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