Subversion vs Bazaar
Seems like I have an opinion on everything these days.
I saw Elijah’s and jamesh’s posts on Bazaar, and being a big Subversion fan, wanted to respond.
James, it’s not the difference in the command set which makes the difference between svn and bzr – it’s the distribution. I get headaches when I try and think about having an official version if there are even 2 or 3 levels of redirection in there. There is nothing wrong with people developing longer-lived projects on branches (svn is made to work nicely that way) but if we were to use bzr the way we use cvs now, we would just have a central repository and a bunch of children. Distribution is also the #1 selling point of bzr, I know – but it somehow feels wrong allowing big developments to happen outside the central repository.
Elijah, svn has pretty good off-line support. Not as good as bzr, granted. svn gives very cheap branching. Both svn and cvs (starting 1.10.something) have support for read-only access. I remember asking someone for stats on cvs.gnome.org and anoncvs.gnome.org access a while back to find out if there were a good reason to split them off – svn.gnome.org could easily give r/o access to anonyous.
