[Zope-dev] Subversion externals versus mirroring

[Wichert Akkerman]

On 9/15/09 13:56 , Gary Poster wrote:
>
> On Sep 15, 2009, at 4:56 AM, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
>>
>> In my experience distributed SCMs add bottlenecks to development that we
>> currently do not have in the Zope community: with both our shared svn
>> repository and distributed SCMs everyone can branch everything, but with
>> distributed SCMs you have to ask a maintainer to merge any changes,
>> something everyone can do directly right now.
>
> FWIW, this is some variable degree of wrong.
>
> 1) "Everyone" cannot merge changes right now: only developers that have
> commit privileges can do that. That's what you meant, I expect.

Indeed.

> 2) Our current arrangement, as well as many others, can be accomplished
> with a DVCS. Launchpad + Bzr definitely support this. You would have a
> Launchpad team of committers, with managed membership; and have the
> official branches owned and controlled by this team.

Indeed, but most people do not do that. With our current setup once you 
get commit privileges you immediately have access to an entire world of 
things. With DVCS hosting systems that people use you have would have to 
request access for every single package. That is cumbersome and adds a 
lot of delay so people don't do that and fork instead. The end result is 
a lot more forks, half of which will probably never be merged back or 
seen by others.

Wichert.