[wx-discuss] new project hosting provider... me?

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi Bryan,

On May 27, 2007, at 10:16 PM, Bryan Petty wrote:

[snip]

> I'm not saying that wxWidgets should use git. In fact, this just won't
> be possible since git has very little support on Windows (one of the
> "features" that Linus loves so much about it). However, as Linus
> mentions in the video, Mercurial is the next best distributed SCM in
> regards to performance, disk space usage, and overall features. In my
> opinion, it's the SCM wxWidgets should use if we want to use a
> distributed system.
>
> I'm probably shooting myself in the foot here since I really wish
> wxWidgets would use SVN, but I'm just tossing this out there for the
> good of the project.
>
> Though if wxWidgets were to move to a distributed system, we should
> expect to run into a number of hiccups with it being such a
> significantly different system from what everyone here is used to
> working with, whereas SVN is probably something most of us are more
> familiar with.

I used Mercurial to host wxWebKit for a while before we moved it to  
an SVN branch in Apple's tree, and to be honest, I think it would  
cause us no end of troubles. One thing that caused Robin and I a lot  
of troubles is that Mercurial is "case-sensitive" - even when the OS/ 
filesystem is not. Worse, it seems to record the filename based on  
your typing rather than the actual filename and mistakes seem to  
'stick' in the repo, so after I apparently didn't use the right case  
on a filename one time, it would continually get confused because it  
couldn't find the "file" in the filesystem. (Doing a case-sensitive  
lookup...) That would cause merge operations to fail and lead to lots  
of fun delete/re-add operations, which surprisingly enough would only  
fix the problem until the next merge with a change to that file.

Also, when I accidently added a rather large binary file, there  
seemed to be simply no removing it. I could do a "remove" on it, yes,  
but a complete copy of the file remained in the history and the  
initial checkout downloads the complete history, meaning that every  
user was required to download that huge binary file. Plus, it's very  
picky about merging from an upstream repo when you have local  
changes. If you don't do the "branch merge" dance very carefully, you  
get weird scenarios like "multiple tips" that no longer want to  
merge. You can usually resolve the issue, but you have to fidget with  
it, sometimes reverting to previous revisions and re-updating in  
several steps.

IMHO, distributed SCM systems sound very promising but from what I've  
tried still feel very new and experimental in nature. I think it's  
best to stick with SVN for now and re-evaluate things when  
distributed SCMs are more widespread and have had lots of people  
working on it and reporting bugs, etc.

Regards,

Kevin

> Regards,
> Bryan Petty
>
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