Centralized vs decentralized

Centralized vs decentralized

Posted Mar 30, 2004 2:41 UTC (Tue) by kfogel (guest, #20531)
In reply to: Centralized vs decentralized by lm
Parent article: subversion 1.0 is released

This mostly fails to address the points Greg Hudson was making.

Point number (1) above, and the final paragraph, are not particularly compelling. Being a formal superset is not the same as being a *convenient* superset.

Imagine a discussion about the relative merits of two programming languages, where someone says "Well, language X is Turing-complete, and so is language Y, therefore Y clearly can't claim any advantage." Anyone who's tried to write large, modular applications in (say) both Lisp and C would probably disagree -- sure, they are formally equivalent, and you could even paint C as a "superset" of Lisp, in that one is much more likely to implement Lisp efficiently in C than vice versa. Yet many people prefer Lisp, for the kinds of tasks they face.

Likewise, Greg is making the twofold claim that a) a certain kind of development process is more likely to succeed, and b) BitKeeper is not as well-suited to that process as centralized-repository systems.

The comparison of Linux's pre-BitKeeper and post-BitKeeper change incorporation rates is somewhat spurious. Greg isn't arguing that BitKeeper wouldn't help a single integrator do his job better; he's arguing that that's not a good model in the first place. I'm not saying he's right or wrong, just asking that his argument be addressed, not evaded. A more useful analysis would have rebutted Greg by saying that the way the Linux kernel project uses BitKeeper is not the way Greg claimed they would (if that's the case -- I don't know).

Greg's essay was written in such a way as to make quality disagreement easy. He provides obvious hooks on which to hang competing claims; he makes clear, specific statements which could turn out to be wrong or incomplete, and he left doors open for that eventuality. It was well-written and thoughtful, and deserved a response in kind. I don't feel it got one here :-(.

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