Re: Alternative DVCS to git: hg?

[Andreas Krey <a.krey%gmx.de@localhost>]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2019 22:10:12 +0000, Sad Clouds wrote:
...
> > - not really doing branches properly or usefully
> What is your definition of a "useful" branch?

A branch that the VCS actually knows as a separate concept,
not this branches-are-paths 'potentially interesting idea',
that turned out to be weird enough that nobody ever reiterated it.

And that also turned merge tracking into a nightmare that literally
took years to get, well, at least almost right. My guess it that
exactly this model will cause subversion to *never* get merging
fixed, the model is just too complicated to fully understand.

And preferrably branches in a history(including branches)-of-trees way,
not tree-of-histories.

> > - not doing or tracking merges properly
> OK some problems exist

Which is a nice way of saying "it's broken for years,
and we're not even trying to fix some cases".

...
> > - not being distributed and usable offline
> No big deal if you don't need distributed VCS

Obviously you don't 'need' distribution. But it makes
live easier, faster, and open to new ideas. E.g. we
do a backup of our git worktrees by doing the equivalent
of a git stash (putting all locally modified and untracked
files into a commit) and pushing that into a backup repo
(plus all the local branches).

Thus having backups of what the developer reasonably needs,
but not all the build artefacts, plus deduplication in
the backup repo.

> > - not having secure guarantees of commit contents
> Meaning? Can you give some examples?

This has been discussed in this thread at length.

> > - being slow and a big resource pig (with a larger attack surface)
> OK Git is somewhat more efficient, but I wouldn't describe Subversion
> as extremely slow.

svn update needs eight roundtrips (last time I checked). With half
a second ping and a few externals that quickly takes half a minute.

And I've seen cases where svn takes five minutes for a merge
that git made in a few seconds.

- Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800