[Python-Dev] Looking for VCS usage scenarios (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Nov 7 03:15:06 CET 2008

Nick Coghlan writes:

If it isn't already there, suspending work on something to work on something else would make a very nice scenario to cover, as it is something even the core devs sometimes have to deal with.

I'd expect any DVCS to be able to handily beat what I currently do with SVN:

Sure, but that's just you. AIUI the "quilt" tool that kernel people use simply automates exactly that process for you in svn or any other VCS. (I don't use quilts myself.) The various DVCSes also have specialized tools for managing patches. Darcs is patch-oriented from the get-go, ditto Arch. Bazaar has "looms", Mercurial has "queues". The advantage of looms and queues is that the patches are managed with the VCS; I don't recall whether there's a way to do that with quilts, but I presume so.

However, I suspect if you're expecting to do this more efficiently in a DVCS, you'll be disappointed. I'll make this scenario concrete in the PEP (for git), but I'd say that the "operation count" would be perhaps higher for me, using git as I like to, than in your scenario. Of course they would be VCS operations, not using patch and diff. What doing it in a DVCS provides is (1) a VCS record of what you did, (2) which can easily be published, and (3) the option of using the VCS to merge the two tasks later.

In other words, DVCS is about keeping and (optionally) communicating local history, not about reducing the number of VC-related operations you do.

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