[Kde-scm-interest] svn, git, bzr

[Rafael Fernández López]

Hi there,

Our project is huge. As every huge project (actually, as every project), the 
better is the team and code organized, the better for the project itself.

Subversion has worked out pretty well, but we have found always problems at 
the time at merging branches, and as you know, they are not specially cheap 
(something that seems that is not a problem with the current machines).

So, some people of this project apart from coding, and comitting work to KDE 
have spent some spare time on investigating other workflows that could benefit 
even more the project, and that could make life easier to KDE contributors.

I have been taking a look to git goodness, and I created couple projects on 
gitorious (foss project hosting, and web interface software, which works 
pretty well, and is free software itself):

http://gitorious.org/projects/personal-kdelibs/repos/mainline/logs/master
http://gitorious.org/projects/personal-kdebase/repos/mainline/logs/master

I locally work with git-svn, so I can commit to svn KDE repository, and update 
from it ('svn up'). I also push all changes from 1000 to 0 times a day to 
gitorious, so it is 'synced' with KDE svn repository.

I love how git improved my workflow on KDE, and how it is so amazingly cool 
working with branches in such an easy way (and cheap!).

As you probably know, on this years' Akademy, Dirk and Sebas are talking about 
Git goodness, and we will probably hold a workshop to talk about how the ideal 
shape of a KDE git based repo would be (there are some technical troubles that 
they will explain deeply on their talk).

It turns out that I also had a look on bzr, which I also wanted to try. I 
haven't tested it, but it seems the way it can change of development model is 
plain amazing.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/Workflows

Now, a very personal point of view (we will discuss this deeply on Akademy, so 
hold tight to your chair ;)

In an amazingly big project (as KDE), you can see on git.kernel.org that 
everything seems a bit crazy. This seems very complex, and for sure this would 
track down some people that could agree on moving to git.

From what I understood about bzr (I didn't tried it yet !), it seems you can 
work on a centralized model (as if you were using svn, without merging 
requests, as you are forced to do on git), and if you get, for instance 
disconnected (because you traveled somewhere where you have not wifi, or you 
are during a travel), you can 'unbind', commit freely (decentralized), and 
then 'bind' again (pushing all commits you did when being 'unbind').

I see in bzr's workflow an amazingly dynamic thing, and pretty simple too.

So, what do you think ? Have you tried bzr ?


Regards,
Rafael Fernández López.
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