wish: better access control

Posted Sep 22, 2005 18:39 UTC (Thu) by bos (guest, #6154)
In reply to: wish: better access control by dann
Parent article: Mercurial: an alternative to git

Merging work and write access are orthogonal concepts.

Here's how merging works in a distributed SCM.

You publish your changes somewhere, and tell me. I pull them over, and merge my changes in. I publish the merged result, and tell you. You pull the results of the merge.

Now we both have your changes and mine, but at no point did either of us have write access to the other's storage.

Another way of approaching the issue: we both have write access to a shared server. However, in many systems, we can't push changes to the server without merging first, so the server cannot get into a messy unmerged state.