[Scilab-Dev] Re: Re: Leaving SVN to GIT

[Jonathan Blanchard]

Although I am not a Scilab developer and do not contribute I do have a
bit of a concern about git. To resume, perhaps a bit bluntly, my
attempt at looking at git I came to the same conclusion I did when I
first tried Linux. It's a very powerful piece of software for sure but
it is also a huge badly documented mess. I'm really sorry but like a
lot of stuff in the opensource community it seem like if it was
written for the people coding it.

Now over with the rambling, on the other side git seem to be oriented
toward extremely non-linear project where branch and merge are common
especially between branch. The idea of branching is generally not to
break the trunk but on the other hand having all the work in progress
in different branch is the same thing to users. They do not have
access to the pseudo Trunk wich is no longer the HEAD but a
combination sof countless branches. Just looking at what project use
svn, gcc and Openoffice come to mind as some of the largest project I
know using svn. We can see from these projects some successful use of
the branch-merge pattern of svn[1].

All in all, not to discourage anything as I won't be profoundly
affected by the switch to git I do believe that git shift the
difficulty of working with a distributed revision system from the
projects managers toward the users and collaborators.

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[1] Ok, Openoffice might not be a good example as they use the entire
CollabNET framework and svn is only a part of it.

Jonathan Blanchard