Home Original page

[python-committers] Survey about DVCSs compared to svn

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Feb 26 15:50:04 CET 2009 
Hi,

I'm no trying to advocate switching to a DVCS, but really:

> I think that's a much better approach and one that reduces the
> load on the python.org repo sys-admins.

How does having 4 more-or-less supported VCSes, rather than 1, lighten
the load on the sysadmins? Even though the DVCSes are theoretically
handled by separate people, they have needs which must be fulfilled by
the sysadmins (e.g. for Mercurial, mod_wsgi had to be installed for the
Web front-end; and we see how much cooperation Bazaar support seems to
require from the sysadmins).

> Another aspect to consider is that Subversion uses copy-on-write,
> so that creating a branch with only a few changes doesn't take
> up much space in the repo.

Other systems like Mercurial (and I'd be surprised if the others didn't
have that option as well) also use copy-on-write when creating clones of
a repository. You shouldn't assume that SVN has optimizations that the
others don't have. SVN is actually quite crappy performance-wise (at
least compared to Mercurial, which I'm used to).

> BTW: You can avoid the extra checkout of the branch in Subversion
> by first locally copying the trunk checkout to a new dir (using e.g.
> cp -al) and then running a "svn switch" on it.

That means you only work on one feature at a time, though (since you
can't locally commit your changes). Besides, every time you switch the
source URL you have to "make distclean", which makes builds quite a bit
longer.
More information about the python-committers mailing list