Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[David Kastrup]

Sam Steingold <address@hidden> writes:

>> * Richard Stallman <address@hidden> [2008-01-06 23:18:05 -0500]:
>>
>>     "the current development version" is not a concept for git.  No
>>     repository is special as far as git is concerned.  The "current
>>     development version" is a social, not a technical concept.  For example,
>>     the git maintainer was off-line unexpectedly for some months recently.
>>     Somebody else took over seamlessly by collecting, arranging and
>>     coordinating patches on the git list into _his_ repository.
>>
>> With CVS, people can get the current version of every program on
>> savannah in a uniform way.  What you say seems to imply that that is
>> not possible with git.  That seems like a big step backwards.
>
> No, this just means that if savannah goes down, nobody can get emacs
> from CVS (people can't work on emacs, can't exchange patches &c).
> with DVCS, someone can announce that he is stepping in for savannah and
> people would hardly notice other than by having to give a different
> argument to "git pull" and "git push".
>
> Note however that with CVS, getting CVS head and building it is hardly
> more expensive than downloading a source tarball - wrt both bandwidth
> and disk space.  With git, the situation is vastly different: you cannot
> just get the head, you always get the whole change history, so instead
> of 40MB, you will be getting and storing 200MB.  This may not be a big
> deal these days for many people, but it might be a showstopper for some.

You just need to get the history once.  After that, only deltas are
transmitted.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum