3 ms·

All of which is fine; and in such cases (where this is a common occurrence for your staff) DVCS is a good fit for the requirements. But do these situations rep

by ErrantX 10y ago

All of which is fine; and in such cases (where this is a common occurrence for your staff) DVCS is a good fit for the requirements. But do these situations represent the overwhelming majority of use cases? In all probability, not.

chongli 10y ago
Lack of network access isn't the only advantage of the distributed model. Computing resources are another major factor. A site like GitHub would not work at all if all those branches, diffs, merges, blames, etc. had to be handled server-side. The author of the original post mentions OpenBSD as an example of how great CVS is but how many brand new users manage to get a patch into the project? Git may be harder to use than CVS but the ability to play around with a local copy of the repo gives new users far more room for experimentation.
prodigal_erik 10y ago
I don't think it's an overwhelming majority if everyone on your team is likely to be cut off at least once a year. At that point it doesn't take much lost productivity to justify the storage for local copies unless you literally have so many huge blobs they can't all fit on a laptop SSD.
- ErrantX 10y ago
  Well sure; but DVCS's don't solve for that problem (or at least, they don't explicitly enable you to work offline). All VCS' allow you to continue to work offline in some form. DVCS allow you to maintain a workflow; which is a subtly different thing (and if your use case is short-term once per year for each person then is it a critical requirement?). I'm not arguing against DVCS; far from it. Just trying to point out a bit of a "requirements fallacy" in some of the comments. You'll have a set of needs (requirements) in your business for an SCM tool. Based on the priority of those requirements then you can make a good choice about which tool to use. But the existence of such a requirements "a stranded developer couldn't code on the train" doesn't create a global condition where using DVCS is the only choice :)

by ErrantX 10y ago

chongli 10y ago

Lack of network access isn't the only advantage of the distributed model. Computing resources are another major factor. A site like GitHub would not work at all if all those branches, diffs, merges, blames, etc. had to be handled server-side. The author of the original post mentions OpenBSD as an example of how great CVS is but how many brand new users manage to get a patch into the project? Git may be harder to use than CVS but the ability to play around with a local copy of the repo gives new users far more room for experimentation.

prodigal_erik 10y ago

I don't think it's an overwhelming majority if everyone on your team is likely to be cut off at least once a year. At that point it doesn't take much lost productivity to justify the storage for local copies unless you literally have so many huge blobs they can't all fit on a laptop SSD.

ErrantX 10y ago
Well sure; but DVCS's don't solve for that problem (or at least, they don't explicitly enable you to work offline). All VCS' allow you to continue to work offline in some form. DVCS allow you to maintain a workflow; which is a subtly different thing (and if your use case is short-term once per year for each person then is it a critical requirement?). I'm not arguing against DVCS; far from it. Just trying to point out a bit of a "requirements fallacy" in some of the comments. You'll have a set of needs (requirements) in your business for an SCM tool. Based on the priority of those requirements then you can make a good choice about which tool to use. But the existence of such a requirements "a stranded developer couldn't code on the train" doesn't create a global condition where using DVCS is the only choice :)