[Kde-scm-interest] distributed source control status

[Thomas Capricelli]

On Monday 13 October 2008 06:41:49 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> I'd also mention that Thiago and others have already put quite some work
> into getting Git ready to be KDE's new VCS [see Thomas' earlier email
> ITT), and it might be easier to built on that work (even if it's with
> another VCS) than to start from scratch.


Ok, after quite some times spent in investigations, I now know I can provide:
* convert scripts
* support for questions, migration, maintainance after the switch. Yes, that's 
a whole lot of time.

Though, news are less great on the technical sides. There are two points when 
i'm finally not able to answer with an easy to use solution with mercurial

* What you call "accountability". There are solutions, but none of which I'm 
satisfied with.
* Submodules/subprojects, or what svn calls 'externals'. There is something in 
mercurial for this ('forests'), but I'm not convinced either, is 
underdocumented, and not easy to user.

Other projects using mercurial (opensolaris, xine, audacious..) do not seem to 
find that those two points are showstopper. The most common pattern is to have 
a central repository people access with ssh keys (which is less 'open' that 
what you seem to want), and those people are trusted if they commit stuff 
coming from other places than them.

++
Thomas
-- 
Thomas Capricelli <orzel at freehackers.org
http://www.freehackers.org/thomas