Distributed Version Control “killer applications”

Question

Considering switching to Mercurial or Git? We are too. I\'m currently studying the benefits of DVCS which turn out to be vast, lust and must.

I would love to hear f

Answer 1

For OSS projects:

low entry barrier to contribute

First, most DVCS has excellent tools to work with patches (usually sent by email), both to create them and to apply them. The contributor can create a patch using any tools (although it would be best to create patch with DVCS used by project, as some DVCS put extra information in patches), and send it to mailing list of a project, or directly to project maintainer, or attach it to the bug report / feature request in an issue tracker.

Second, you don't need commit bit to be able to contribute. Just clone project repository, and you can use full power of DVCS. You can then send patches, or a pull request, or push to 'mob' branch; there are many possibilities.

It is an advantage also for project maintainer(s): he/she doesn't have to worry who can he/she trust to give "commit bit", i.e. access to repository, as it is the case in CVCS. Karl Fogel wrote in Producing Open Source Software. How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. that he found it better for the project that restrictions such as access control better be social rather than technological; DVCS takes it further thanks to not requiring to decide whether to provide permission to commit.