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>So, do folks doing distributed development routinely push changes in a peer to peer fashion? Alice, Bob, and Charlene are collaborating with Alice and Bob work

>So, do folks doing distributed development routinely push changes in a peer to peer fashion? Alice, Bob, and Charlene are collaborating with Alice and Bob working on one feature while Alice and Charlene work on another, pushing incremental changes to each other but only sending the completed feature/branch to their non-collaborating peers when they’re complete. Yes. The prototypical example is the Linux kernel, which is what git was originally created for. There, there are a large number of different trees. Linus's tree is 'standard' Linux, but there are the various stable trees, there are trees for various subsystems, there's the continuous integration tree 'linux-next', and others. Those trees' changes are all intended to eventually reach Linus's tree. But there are other trees which aren't, they host patchsets that sit on top of Linux "proper" but aren't intended to ever be upstreamed. >Does that happen often or is it just the “commit early, commit often to the local copy” that distributed devs are really using? “I can edit on a plane” scenarios. In practice, not many open source projects are big enough and distributed enough that they need to do what Linux does. This aspect of it is very useful too: that you can code on a plane, that you can code in the bath, that you can code in a shack in the woods, etc.

forrestthewoods 3y ago
Good description of the Linux trees, thanks! > This aspect of it is very useful too: that you can code on a plane, that you can code in the bath, that you can code in a shack in the woods, etc. Even turbo-centralized Perforce supports offline mode. Distributed systems enable offline mode, but offline mode does not require a hyper distributed system!
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  git doesn't have an offline mode. git simply has a handful of commands that require network access, none of them a part of "day to day" development work, nor necessary to fully utilize git if your canonical repository is on your own machine. my biggest problem with perforce (it's been years since i used it) was that it had a "checkout" model where it was necessary to do something before starting any code changes that you might want to commit later. i found that quite problematic, and reminiscent in some way of older systems like cvs. git manages to retain the sense of "the codebase is just a bunch of files" all the time, and that works better for me.

forrestthewoods 3y ago

Good description of the Linux trees, thanks! > This aspect of it is very useful too: that you can code on a plane, that you can code in the bath, that you can code in a shack in the woods, etc. Even turbo-centralized Perforce supports offline mode. Distributed systems enable offline mode, but offline mode does not require a hyper distributed system!

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
git doesn't have an offline mode. git simply has a handful of commands that require network access, none of them a part of "day to day" development work, nor necessary to fully utilize git if your canonical repository is on your own machine. my biggest problem with perforce (it's been years since i used it) was that it had a "checkout" model where it was necessary to do something before starting any code changes that you might want to commit later. i found that quite problematic, and reminiscent in some way of older systems like cvs. git manages to retain the sense of "the codebase is just a bunch of files" all the time, and that works better for me.