Cees De Groot wrote:

>On 1/27/06, Simon Kirk <Simon.Kirk at pinesoft.co.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>Please excuse the verbosity.
>>
>And please excuse me for snipping it all in my response :-).  
>
Please excuse me for hacking and slashing your reply ;) We're all very 
polite around here, very refreshing!

Wow, I certainly generated a big thread. Thanks very much for all the 
help and replies folks. :)

>The basic question is: can you do optimistic version control with MC
>with a larger group. Modulo some performance problems (which, it turns
>out, are related to source file writing and should be fairly simple to
>remove), I think with MC(+MCC) you have everything you need in the
>tools.
>
I'm not sure what MCC is. Is it MC2? I have read in the list that the 
performance of MC2 is vastly improved over MC.

>You cannot (should not?) name versions, but I've used "special
>comments" in CVS with great success (I first used CVS when it was a
>bunch of shell scripts around RCS, so I'm reasonably experienced with
>the system), and with MC that shouldn't be any different.
>
I may have mislead somewhat with any emphasis on CVS, though - I'm 
talking more from the perspective of somebody who now uses svn - 
therefore I no longer need to worry about tagging (or special comments 
as you put it?) revisions in CVS, svn increments the revision number 
repository-wide on every commit, but I digress somewhat.

>The merge tool is simple but sufficient (and easy enough to extend - try to
>extend CVS while you're working with it ;-))
>
You have a good point about the extensibility of MC vs CVS, and it's 
indeed nice to know that the system in hand can be modded for our needs 
very well.  However, in contrast to that it is my opinion a 
fully-fledged scm should already meet the requirements that I loosely 
specced out in my tome of an original email. Customisability is great, 
but with the merge tool seems to be a case in point: I think the merge 
functionality of Eclipse is a good model (well, certainly the best out 
of all the merge tools that I previously used) to start with, but how 
does MC compare? I can't categorically say as I haven't used MC enough 
(I'm using it now so I'm sure I'll hit the point to be able to compare 
soon), but the graphical "helpers" in Eclipse really make merging clear. 
I hope the merging in MC and Squeak measures up.

So I'll have to leave this here, for now: But I'll be happy to post my 
interpretations of MC/Squeak merging compared to Eclipse/Araxis 
Merge/diff/etc once I've got a bit more experience.

>, and branching support is very good.
>
> Every MC version carries around its whole version history,
>so developers can commit versions to private repositories and then a
>final version to the shared repository; MC will see the gaps and just
>skip over them.  
>
That's good to know, as branching is integral to my development model. 
I'm really thinking now that a large part of my worry with MC is that 
the documentation just doesn't cater well to people like me. I've read 
through the documentation on MC are wiresong.ca, and doesn't help much 
in the description of how MC works. There are no diagrams describing the 
branching model, or dependencies. A brief mention of the Merge button 
that Avi mentions in one of his replies to this thread. No mention of 
comparisons between svn/cvs/$YOURSCMHERE and MC. These things would all 
massively help the understanding of MC - and very importantly grease the 
wheels of transition between the more commonly-used programming 
languages and Squeak. Let's face it: the easier that transition is the 
better, because I think Squeak has such massive potential and every 
block that stops it being adopted is a Very Bad Thing (tm).

>[snip]
>Note, by the way, that I would object against any single system under
>development of a single 30-40 person team :-).  
>
I may have mislead a bit here as well - it was a single system, but it 
was about 50 seperate CVS (then svn) modules which were combined using 
J2EE/Tomcat/Eclipse cleverness into one coherant system :)

I think the fact that it all worked smoothly was a testament to the 
development system we'd put together ;)

Cheers,
Simon


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