Rob Sanheim wrote the following on 13.03.2007 00:07 :
> On 3/12/07, Tanner Burson <tanner.burson / gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This is going a bit OT for ruby-talk, but I'll bite.
>>
>> I work from several different machines, in several different locations,
>> including from a laptop that is often disconnected from the
>> internet.  It's
>> extremely useful for me to be able to record changes, branch, work,
>> in my
>> normal manner, without worrying about the fact that when I DO get a
>> connection all my changes will show up as one big lump.  So I use
>> Darcs over
>> SSH.  It gives me a full, functional repository with "commits" as I need
>> them, without being connected.  Then when I get back to civilization
>> I can
>> push all my changes back to my main repo and be good to go, SVN can't
>> give
>> me that kind of work flow, so I've moved away from it.  (I'm aware of
>> SVK,
>> but never could get it working well on linux/mac/and windows)
>>
>> At work, where I work from a single workstation, always connected to the
>> network, I use SVN, because it fits the environment better.  Use the
>> tool
>> that fits the job, and move on.
>
> Is this the only real compelling reason to switch to Darcs or similiar
> alternatives?   For me I'm never off the net long enough for the
> centralized repository in svn to become a problem.  Even when I'm
> working from a laptop most of the day, I'll have free wifi available
> somewhere to sync up.
>

I'm currently looking at decentralized version control systems for my
own needs. So it's my early ideas on the subject, feel free to correct
them...

Where it can help is when a developper has a bright idea and want to
implement it without impacting others. She creates a branch on her local
repository to try out her idea and work with it (and can do for a
longtime, merging patches from the branch she follows usually along the
way). If you often have ideas being tried out, it can be a benefit
because these branches would all be cluttering your common repository
with a centralized system (this is why you can have lots of Linux kernel
trees with git, each with its own purpose, the most popular by far being
Linus Torvalds' one).

This probably is a real benefit when you have lots of really good devs
all motivated to try out their ideas. This allows large group of
developpers to scale.

Lionel.