Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

Posted Dec 2, 2004 22:38 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed by aleXXX
Parent article: Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

IMHO, the biggest advantage of a distributed SCM is the ability to version control things that don't work yet. If you're working on a big project with a lot of people, and you need to make a change which will take three days and not build successfully while you're working on it, and you're using CVS, you can't check in each of the steps or check in each day's work without breaking the tree for everyone else. This means that you don't end up with a good commit message (set), because you've got changes in there that you haven't thought about for days, and you have to make sure you don't mess things up. If you accidentally delete something in the evening that you wrote in the morning (assuming overnight backups), you have to redo it.

With a distributed SCM, you can check in each logical change to your own subrepository, and then check your complete set into the official repository when it works. A distributed SCM doesn't mean that there isn't a central server; it means that there isn't *only* a central server.

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