Re: distributed version control

[Shai Ayal]

On Jan 29, 2008 1:22 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 28-Jan-2008, Shai Ayal wrote:
>
> | So if I understand right, our current method of working via email
> | patches will probably stay almost the same, except that the merges can
> | now be distributed and won't take too much of jwe's time?
>
> With a switch to a distributed system, everyone who wants to work on
> Octave can have their own archive(s).  That can help a lot if you
> don't have constant net access and still want to work.  My
> understanding is that branching should be easy, so you can branch all
> you like and commit in your own archive without causing any trouble or
> cluttering the main archive with half-baked branches.  It means you
> can also work on a patch and periodically check in changes to your own
> archive (as a safety net) without needing to have access to a central
> archive.  I would certainly make use of this myself as a way to do
> experimental things (like the graphics or object branch), though I
> might choose to not share the changes until I feel they are worth
> looking at.  In the past these kinds of branches became public
> immediately, which I don't hink it always desirable.
>
> I assume people would consider my archive to be the "official" one,
> and I would publish it in a public place for others to clone or pull
> from.  The public copy would most likely be read-only for everyone
> except me.  This would be analogous to the current read-only CVS
> archive.
>
> There are several methods by which we could share changes.
>
> Anyone wishing to get get changes from me can pull from my public
> archive.
>
> To submit changes to me, there are several options:
>
>   * Publish your own archive on the web somewhere and allow me to pull
>     from it.  I would probably only do this from a few people, but it
>     could simplify things for me as (for example) Michael might
>     accumulate changes to the graphics subsystem and publish them.
>     Then I could pull the changes from him.  Doing that rather than
>     having to handle email diffs would be much faster for me.
>
>   * Send a [git|hg] changeset in email.  I think this would be better
>     than the patches we currently use because these changesets include
>     extra data explaining how the VCS should import them.
>
>   * Send plain old context diff in email as we have always done,
>     though this would become the least desirable method as I think it
>     would require more work to merge.
>
> As for how someone behind a firewall could push to their public
> server, I think you would need a place to host your archive (a web
> server) and then you could push using https or http (with a password,
> at least with hg).


For mercurial hosting solutions:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MercurialHosting

git seems to have a few more solutions:
http://www.google.com/search?q=git+hosting

Shai


> To ease the transition, I think we can continue to have a read-only
> CVS archive available in a public place by exporting the [hg|git]
> archive to CVS.
>
> jwe
>