Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Merging is the key to soft...
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Saved by 3 people (1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-03
- Danieljomphe on 2008-10-01 - Tags dvcs , vcs , comparison
- Dsegonds on 2007-12-20 - Tags scm
- Gotgenes on 2007-10-14 - Tags bazaar , blog , cvs , dscm , for:abml , for:farcepest , for:gamezace , for:guardian72 , for:gvwilson , for:jewdan , for:ramblurr , for:third , git , merging , scm , shuttleworth , softwarecarpentry , subversion
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We must keep the cost of merging as low as possible if we want to encourage people to collaborate as much as possible. If a merge is awkward, or slow, or results in lots of conflicts, or breaks when people have renamed files and directories, then I’m likely to avoid merging early and merging often. And that just makes it even harder to merge later.
Highlighted by danieljomphe
The beauty of distributed version control comes in the form of spontaneous team formation, as people with a common interest in a bug or feature start to work on it, bouncing that work between them by publishing branches and merging from one another. These teams form more easily when the cost of branching and merging is lowered, and taking this to the extreme suggests that it’s very worthwhile investing in the merge experience for developers.
Highlighted by danieljomphe
In CVS and SVN, the “time to branch” is low, but merging itself is almost always a painful process. Worse, merging a second time from another branch is WORSE, so the incentives for developers to merge regularly are exactly the wrong way around. For merge to be a smooth experience, the tools need to keep track of what has been merged before, so that you never end up redoing work that you’ve already solved. Bzr and Git both handle this pretty well, remembering which revisions in someone else’s branch you have already integrated into yours, and making sure that you don’t need to bother to do it again.
Highlighted by danieljomphe
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