[Kde-scm-interest] distributed source control status

[Thomas Zander]

On Monday 27. October 2008 02:18:43 Thomas Capricelli wrote:
> 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.

I share the office with one of the git peeps in Qt Software.  This means 
that if people have hard questions they come to him. (we are spreading the 
knowledge quickly, though ;)
After we switched to Git for Qt one thing we struggled with was basically 
the question of accountability.  But in a much more friendly way.

People don't set up their email addresses properly, people forget to rebase 
and instead merge which creates a more complex history to understand. And 
other things.
The basic problem then is that if I want to answer a question as to whom 
made a certain merge, who pushed a certain commit etc. You quickly realize 
that people just following their old workflow *will* make simple mistakes 
that leads to confusion.
And confusion over the concepts of distributed systems can lead to distrust 
unless you have enough information to explain what happened. And tell the 
user what he or she can do to avoid a certain situation (use pull --rebase 
instead of merge) or something as simple as gitorious has a bug and shows 
files touched in a merge commit.

So, to avoid distrust we need accountability.
Naturally to have accountability we also need it, but I think the former 
reason is vital to having a successful roll-out of a new SCM because when 
developers start to distrust their SCM, it becomes a barrier to 
contribution.
-- 
Thomas Zander
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