Re: [boost] DCVS vs CVS: call for constructivism

Subject: Re: [boost] DCVS vs CVS: call for constructivism
From: Martin Geisler (mg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-27 11:46:15

Philippe Vaucher <philippe.vaucher_at_[hidden]> writes:

>>
>>> Simply saying that X is better because of some general reasons,
>>> which do not apply IMO to actual usage. does not make me want to do
>>> something different in programming and programming tools.
>>
>> How do faster operations, versioned patches, versioned local work,
>> smaller average commit size and better merging not apply to actual
>> usage?
>
> There's another advantage I forgot about: the ability to commit only
> certain parts of a file.

That's technically not a property of having a DVCS: you could also
imagine committing part of a file with Subversion: save the current
changes with 'svn diff', revert the file, apply part of the patch you
saved, and commit before apply ing the rest of your patch.

It just so happens that this feature was introduced in DVCS, I believe
Darcs was the first tool to provide this feature, and since then
Mercurial got 'hg record' and Git got 'git add -i'.

It's a killer feature, though! :)

-- 
Martin Geisler
aragost Trifork
Professional Mercurial support
http://www.aragost.com/mercurial/