[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Mike Little]

On 11 December 2010 17:48, Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name> wrote:

> I was not writing about technical, but methodology on branching. Subversion
> by design of being centralized wants everyone to work on the same Trunk or
> branch. You can see this with WordPress.org development, so don't tell me
> I'm wrong. I do not see many feature branches and this is what I'm talking
> about. The very nature of GIT or decentralized is one which wants you to
> work on branches and then merge back into the main. Is this or is this not
> true?
>

Just because the WordPress team don't choose to use the branch and merge
features of Subversion doesn't mean it *can't* support them.

Subversion's design does *not* "want everyone to work on the same trunk and
branch". It seems you are mistaking a centralised repository as being a
restriction on branches that can be created and worked on.

I have worked with a lot revision control systems from a home grown one
(built from DOS batch files and pkzip in 1990), through RCS/MKS, PVCS,
Visual Source Safe, CVS, CVSNT, Perforce, and Subversion.
Of those only the first and RCS/MKS did not support branches -- though PVCS
and VSS had very poor branch support. But with every other system, I have
*always* created branches for feature development and release support.

For some of those systems, I have supported development teams on three
continents across 4 timezones, each with their own multiple branches. I have
managed the version control of projects with up to 10 parallel branches of
development, again for both release support and for multiple overlapping
feature development streams.

It seems you may be mistaken in believing that because Git encourages (and
makes easier) branch and merge development, that it is the only one that
supports that. Not so.


Mike
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/