Tonight Brian Fitzpatrick (Fitz) from the Chicago Google office did a presentation for the clepy group on version control at Google. They use subversion on top of their own super-cool bigtable filesystem back end.
We had a good discussion on the merits of centralized vs. decentralized version control. According to Fitz, decentralized systems discourage collaboration. He made the joke, “Did you hear about the decentralized version control conference? Nobody showed up.” He made the point that centralized repositories encourage review and discussion. I agree with that.
Apparently subversion 1.5, which will be released in a few months, will have much improved merging facilities. We won’t need to use --stop-on-copy to figure out where we branched. Also, it will be safe to repeat a merge, because nothing will happen on the second attempt.
The presenter was Brian Fitzpatrick (aka “Fitz”), Engineering Manager for their Chicago office, and a core dev for svn.
Thanks Mike for the more information! I updated my post with Brian’s name.
Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.
Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.
Myself as well, being a longtime Subversion user. They're right in that a centralized server does encourage discussion and review among my peers and I.