we need distributed control system

Benoît Dejean — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:39:00 +0200

I have a commit access to GNOME svn, so i'm able to do whatever i want with my code, and then commit it. My main free software contribution has been GNOME for a long time.
I've recently started to hack on awffull (log analyser, it's a webalizer fork, but webalizer is dead). I keep submitting patches on the mailing lists, i'm mainly interested in memory usage, which is a real issue with huge logs, and even more on 32bits (allocating more than 2GiB is risky). One of my patch provides a 7% memory usage improvement by using flexible arrays : this saves millions of malloc calls so heap admin / malloc overhead is much lower.

But, even if Steve (upstream) and the mailing list people are great and very responsive, my patches have not been merged yet. I totally understand why they are not already merged, but i have no way to provide my branch to other awffull fans. So i started stacking everything in a local git repository. But now I need again and again to resplit the patches because upstream just can't merge my changes. I now realize how much we need distributed control system (git, monotone, etc). Without it, patches get lost on mailing lists, they get obsolete, they don't apply anymore ... a big waste of work.

With a distributed control system, upstream is able to pull from contributors, merge or cherrypick.

I'm frustrated about awffull, i now better understand how people could be frustrated about GNOME.
I am sorry for everyone (hackers, packagers, etc) who work hard on free software but are unable to (easily) get their job upstream because of the stupid VCS we are still using.

Harvard Business School of Echec - Tag - awffull

we need distributed control system