Why git or Mercurial? (Was: Re: [Ffmpeg-devel] Switch to svn?)

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Dec 25, 2005 at 07:20:31AM +0100, Luca Barbato wrote:
> Points:
> 1 - take less to deploy / don't require neon and happy friends
> 2 - has already a nice set of tools / yes are new and already have some
> 3 - allows the distributed model / not a big selling point given the 
> audience ^^;

This is hardly a detailed explanation. In the past, we have had
in-depth discussions of different version control systems and their
pros and cons. You shoud look these up in the archives and evaluate
GIT and Mercurial in light of these.

Particular concerns:
- anything that requires repo users to have a full copy of the repo
(rather than just their checked-out version) is out of the question
imo. it's a huge obstacle to people joining.
- something with nasty dependencies (strange libs, strange lang
(including c++), etc.) is undesirable.
- ability to represent history of the tree and not just files, i.e.
moving files etc.
- ... lots of other stuff i don't remember or know about.

This is a complicated issue. If you want to promote something new when
svn is already known to work well enough you need to be providing us
damn good info to base decisions on..

Rich