[Noisebridge-discuss] big led screen

[Mitch Altman]

Thanks for the excellent explanation, Andy!

 

 

Mitch.

 

 

 

------------------------

 

> Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:34:03 -0800
> From: adi at hexapodia.org
> To: maltman23 at hotmail.com
> CC: nils at shkoo.com; noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> Subject: Re: [Noisebridge-discuss] big led screen
> 
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 01:16:18PM -0800, Mitch Altman wrote:
> > For those of us who aren't familiar with it, could you say a little
> > bit more about what Mercirial is? And how to use it? Is there a wiki
> > page on our site about it?
> 
> Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) similar in
> usage model to Git, the system used to manage the Linux kernel. (See
> [1] below for why I recommend Mercurial over Git.)
> 
> I recommend DVCS for all new software projects, rather than centralized
> VCS systems like Subversion (SVN) or ancient, crufty systems like CVS or
> (shudder) SourceSafe. There is a small additional cost to using DVCS in
> some cases -- you have to think about local versus remote repositories
> -- but the benefits are enormous. (See [2] below for one caveat.)
> 
> The Mercurial wiki at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ has a lot
> of great info and introductions for people who've used other systems.
> 
> There's an illustrated intro to DVCS Concepts at
> http://betterexplained.com/articles/intro-to-distributed-version-control-illustrated/
> that provides more details about what all this stuff is.
> 
> [1] Why Mercurial?
> 
> I prefer Mercurial over Git for small projects because
> 1. mercurial has a more friendly command line UI
> 2. mercurial has fewer bizarre failure modes ('what do you mean I have
> to "git reset --hard 689eaf05028f"?')
> 3. mercurial has a more functional Windows port (although I still
> recommend that Windows users simply run Ubuntu under VMWare Player
> to do real software development rather than attempting to use Cygwin
> or whatever.)
> The downside of mercurial, though, is that it's somewhat slower than
> git. Hg commands tend to take up to a second or two rather than git's
> blazingly fast UI -- 50 millseconds (yes, I timed it!) for many
> commands. And Hg has a somewhat slower repository engine due to being a
> nearly-pure Python implementation rather than Git's insanely complicated
> C engine, so really large projects like Linux are not a good fit.
> 
> 
> [2] When should you use a centralized VCS rather than a DVCS?
> 
> The one caveat to my "always use DVCS" mantra is that projects where
> large files are repeatedly modified will explode any DVCS system's
> repository size. So if you're checking in 100MB .avi files (which is
> often a stupid idea, but sometimes makes sense, for example video
> artists such as our own pvck/mediapathic) and repeatedly modifying them,
> then using a centralized VCS may make more sense. The DVCS systems are
> evolving, and there's a reasonable chance someone will come up with a
> decent solution to this problem in the next 18 months, but for now,
> check your large media files into SVN instead.
> 
> -andy

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/attachments/20090226/ec3231be/attachment-0003.html>