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[Gnu-arch-users] Re: may I pick your brains?
From: |
Miles Bader |
Subject: |
[Gnu-arch-users] Re: may I pick your brains? |
Date: |
23 Feb 2004 14:28:22 +0900 |
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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- [Gnu-arch-users] may I pick your brains?, Tom Lord, 2004/02/22
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] may I pick your brains?, Paul Pelzl, 2004/02/23
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] may I pick your brains?, Aaron Bentley, 2004/02/23
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] may I pick your brains?, Robert Collins, 2004/02/24
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] may I pick your brains?, Scott Parish, 2004/02/24