[ILUG] Distributed versus Centralised SCM.

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

What is the deal with decentralised SCM being the holy grail of source 
control?

Ie, I'm sure darcs/monotone/arch provide better/more intelligent 
features then cvs... but... what I don't quite grasp (having not used a 
decentralised SCM, but, being in a position where I can effectively 
cherry pick my SCM), is how, I would reasonably synchronise say, four 
developers, distributed-source trees, into a release build on a "release 
build box"?

Would it be the case that _I_ would have to ssh into this box, and then 
pull a darcs/monotone/arch tree from all my developers... and then 
synchronise the conflicts by hand?

If so, then I think that distributed SCM is a _reterograde_ step from 
centralised SCM... even though it's new and shiny and popular... and 
only a heretic would speakeath against what's new and shiny and popular.

Or is it the case that I just don't "get" how the distributed model 
works in this case and if so, can someone explain to me, how, for 
example I would do a "release build" on a central server somewhere, for 
when we wanted to do a firmware release, and there were ... say 2 to 4 
different versions of the decentralised source repository floating around ?

Would I have to have a cron setup on the server, to incrementally 'pull' 
changes from the decentralised repositories, into the server, from all 
2/4 developers... and if so... what the hell would happen with diff 
conflicts ? I'm sure this is a very _obvious_ question to those who have 
used the above tools... but, before I go spending hours find this out 
the hard way... does anyone on ILUG have definitive answers here ?

--
Bryan