Re: SCMS question

On Feb 22, 9:49 am, alvhe(dot)(dot)(dot)(at)commandprompt(dot)com (Alvaro Herrera) wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > It's also fair to say that this is a subject about which we usually get
> > much more noise from partisans of other SCM systems than from the
> > relatively small number of people who actually have to maintain the
> > postgresql code. (As Tom has pointed out, our biggest pain point is the
> > occasional wish to move things across directories.)

While annoying, this is something that really only a problem for the
CVS maintainer (and anyone who's stuck waiting for the maintainer to
shuffle stuff). I suggest that while it would be nice to solve this
problem, it's more of a bonus side-effect rather than a significant
benefit to changing SCMs.

> For example, currently if I have a patch and somebody reviews it and
> opines that I have to change foo to bar; then I resubmit the patch. How
> do they find out whether I actually changed foo to bar? Currently there
> are two alternatives:
>
> 1. trust that I did it
> 2. review the whole patch again
>
> With a distributed SCM, I could just patch the code and commit a new
> revision in my branch to just change foo to bar, and then the reviewer
> can check that I truly did what he wanted.
>
> Another easy thing to do is to track the current HEAD in a branch of
> mine. Keeping patches up to date in parallel with other developments is
> easier.

Alvaro's arguments above suggest a significant, ongoing pay-off for
everyone who writes patches, everyone who reviews patches and everyone
who has to maintain separate patches. I won't attempt to quantify this
pay-off, but it looks pretty significant to me.

Andrew