[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: Advocating periodic releases

Panagiotis Issaris takis.issaris
Sat Oct 7 10:03:52 CEST 2006


Hi,

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 01:45:36AM +0200, Aurelien Jacobs wrote:
>[...]
> > > main competitors of GIT are other distributed systems.
> > True. I should have mentioned other systems, such as Bitkeeper, Bazaar, TLA,
> > Svk, darcs, ...
> 
>  - Bitkeeper is closed-source
>  - Bazaar and TLA are dead
Yep, I had Bazaar-NG in mind when mentioning Bazaar, as Bazaar itself seemed
nothing but a fork of Arch/TLA.

>  - Svk don't seem very good (at least not very popular)
That was my problem with it too. And it looked a bit like a hack.

>  - darcs is quite slow
Indeed.

> But you didn't mentionned the real GIT competitors, which are Bazaar-NG
> and Mercurial. Bazaar-NG seems to not be as mature and quite slower.
> But Mercurial has a very similar feature set. It is often slightly faster
> than GIT and slightly more storgage efficient. The biggest advantage
> of Mercurial over GIT is IMO it's better and simpler user interface.
Yep, in fact, I had just forgotten Mercurial in this e-mail, I had added them to
my homepage, and first fact :)

I remember being quite impressed with the Mercurial benchmarks and features
posted on the git/kernel mailinglist at the start of the git project. In fact,
as far as I can remember, Mercurial seemed to be a few steps a head both
performancewise and featurewise (to git). At that time though, it seemed git was
getting most users, which increased my trust in it (as bugs should be spotted
much sooner).

> For example, I don't want to mess with the repository internal. Why does
> git-repack exist ? It should just work without letting me know.
The idea behind it AFAIK is: You want it to be really fast, but you also
want to have a really good compressionratio. These things don't easily work
together :) So, the solution of git is: Don't do the time-consuming stuff
automatically, do it when the user decides he has time for it.

But I agree that it would have been preferable if it worked without depending on
a user to use the git-repack command. I'm gonna work around this by installing a
cronjob and nicing it.

> > But, some of them have not been used intensively enough for my liking. The only
> > two of them that have effectively been used on large projects AFAIK are
> > Bitkeeper and GIT. As Bitkeeper is closed-source and commercial software, the
> > choice was rather easy for me :)
> 
> Probably because you didn't know about Mercurial ;-)
You're right :) I'd forgotten it for this e-mail at least :) 

> It is used by some important projects such as Xen, alsa, v4l... It has
> been choosed by open solaris and is currently evaluated (with success)
> to handle the full tree of FreeBSD ports (much bigger than linux or
> other such projects).
Nice! I wasn't aware of that! I only knew about Xen, and I think I recall the
GCC people investigating both GIT and Mercurial, but I could be mistaken.

> Anyway, GIT and Mercurial are both very good, and when you are accustomed
> to them, you can't appreciate SVN anymore.
*Fully* agree on that. It makes working with sourcecode _a lot_ more efficient
and fun.

With friendly regards,
Takis




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