Development issues part 1: Project communication [LWN.net]

Development issues part 1: Project communication

Posted Jan 10, 2008 3:43 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
Parent article: Development issues part 1: Project communication

>One of the main DVCS features that seems of interest to Stallman is the "offline"
capabilities. Having the entire history of a project and being able to do commits of work in
progress while being disconnected from the internet are features that CVS does not have.

Did he hear of Git yet? Also, "distributed" itself already screams for offline working, but I
am welcome to hear counter-examples.

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Development issues part 1: Project communication

Posted Jan 10, 2008 7:25 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

The article says, "Richard Stallman has been asking a lot of questions 
about git"....

Distributed version control

Posted Jan 11, 2008 9:42 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Actually, in a general context "distributed" calls for online working -- different machines connecting between them. "Distributed version control" (the phrase in the article) used to be what CVS does -- instead of one machine where everyone develops and keeps code, there is a central repository and a network of distributed developer machines. So you need to be online. Technically git is a "distributed repository", where many developer machines keep different repositories that can be synchronized between them, and that allows for offline working.

Just a pedantic point, but it might illustrate the irony of the situation. For old-school people like Stallman "distributed" does not call for offline working, but just the opposite.