[slime-devel] Re: Mercurial

[Brian Mastenbrook]

Helmut Eller wrote:
> Some other big projects are also using hg.  Both, git and hg should
> easily handle SLIME.  I would prefer hg, but the main question is:
> should we switch at all?

No. These days it appears that cvs is becoming the least common 
denominator from which people mirror git or $DVCSOFWEEK. Folks who want 
to use a distributed version control system can set up mirroring from 
cvs upstream. For the rest of us it's just one less package to install 
on N different computers where I have SLIME checked out. In fact it'd 
probably be even better if actual development took place off the mirror 
and got pushed to CVS HEAD when it worked reliably.

Before switching to the new distributed hotness of the week, ask first 
if the one you're choosing is going to get enough critical mass that 
when the next hot version control system comes out somebody's going to 
bother writing an importer for your now old-and-decrepit system. If 
that's in doubt, you've flushed the entire point of version control 
(maintaining history) down the drain.

I personally wouldn't mind if all the cvs users out there switched to 
svn, but for whatever reason that doesn't seem to be happening rapidly. 
svn is at the point where I think it's mature enough to deploy in broad 
use and well adopted enough in industry that it's not going to become 
unmaintained any time within the next decade.

-- 
Brian Mastenbrook
brian at mastenbrook.net
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/