Re: [Caml-list] [OT] Rant about VCS: Conclusions

[Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com>]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:19:40 -0800
David Brown <caml-list@davidb.org> wrote:

> The implementors Arch and Darcs seem to understand the complexity and
> difficulty of cross branch merging, and embrace it head on.  Other
> solutions tend to brush off the problem as not important, and generally
> leave the user with some very tricky merge cases.

Yes indeed. The funny thing is that when you get a system that does know
how to handle all this, you get new ways of working that simply aren't
possible with more archaic systems.

For instance, the most common usage of Arch with two geographically 
remote developers has developer A set up an initial public archive on 
a web server WA. The second developer B then branches the first archive 
to a second public archive on a second web server WB.

A can now apply changes to his own archive and merge from B's and B
can merge from A and apply his own changes to his archive. Under this
scheme he merge tree will look like this (ascii art):

   A ----+---+->
       \/  \/
       /\  /\
     ----+---+->
   B

This is the most simple example, but also works for a larger number of 
developers and developers who have private as well as public trees.

This development model is simply not available to any source control
system which can't keep track of which patches have been applied.

> Perforce (commercial) attempts to track merge history, but does a terrible
> job of it.

Perforce is just all round horrible. I use it in my day job and I'm
constantly wishing we were using Arch instead. Unfortunately we have
a number of windows users and Arch doesn't play nice with the horribly
broken windows filesystem/API/whatever.

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam@mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Seen on comp.lang.python:
Q : If someone has the code in python for a buffer overflow,
    please post it.
A : Python does not support buffer overflows, sorry.