Reg : Keyword expansionS

[Lester Caine]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> A DVCS is*not*  a CVCS. It has different strengths and
> weaknesses. Trying to force a DVCS into workflows designed around a
> CVCS might work - mercurial is pretty flexible that way - but it's
> fighting against the grain. Rather than asking "how can I change this
> DVCS to fit my workflow",

BUT ... IS DVCS actually providing an advantage?

The MAIN reason I am even bothering is that one of my main source projects has 
gone 'git' despite complaints that it is not suitable for half of the developers 
who are windows based. git can be made to work on windows, but not without 
completely destroying the rest of the windows infrastructure. At least Hg works 
out of the box and fairly transparently on Windows and Linux ... with an Eclipse 
front end.

So now I am trying to co exist with a pile of git repos diversely forking the 
core code ( 'git' IS a perfect title for this! ) and still maintaining a stable 
build structure for my own distributions. Why do I want version headers on every 
file .... because a few files MAY WELL be modified for a particular distribution 
.... and having to scout back other files to see which ones have changed is not 
an advantage ... when there are several thousand files across a few hundred 
modules and that is ignoring Apache/PHP/Firebird version changes which bring 
their own problems.

>  you should be asking "how can I change my workflow to best take advantage of this DVCS".
Install hg on every remote site? But most of them are inside security systems 
that do not allow pulling from the internet, which is why we need to be able to 
bundle and manage a local package. DVCS is trumped as a better way of doing 
things, but it is just a different way of doing things and still does not 
provide a better way for some requirements ... just like SVN was never a real 
replacement for CVS just a different way of making the same mistakes. A PROPER 
distributed system should allow for different types of end users not straight 
jacket them into a different way of working ...

Just like the 'read only' repositories, more flexible views of the stored files 
would make things a lot more end user friendly. If only a few files in modulex 
change for a priority bug fix, only those files need distributing, but we need 
to know which sites have been patched and which not. Changing another file is 
unnecessary - heck the database keeps track of the version numbers of each 
module anyway - but you may be right - I need to have hg on the sites to check 
that files HAVE been changed. But the only transfer method inside the firewalls 
is for a file upload.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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