[ILUG] Distributed versus Centralised SCM.

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

Dave O Connor wrote:

> With the distributed model, the central repository is still there, but
> project A is able to have its own SCM node, and changes to that (in
> our example) should not very much coincide with project B. These days,
> it's easy enough to auto-integrate changes into another branch, so
> integrating changes for the node for project A into the central
> repository shouldn't require human intervention (apart from
> unresolvable conflicts, which in theory shouldn't happen, since teams
> should have effective communication on changes to things that
> overlap).

Hmm, I still don't really get that. Developer-A has his copy of 
project-A, as does Developer-B...

When it comes time to do a release build on "Central box" wouldn't 
someone _me_ have to go to that box and integrated Developer-A's tree 
with Developer-B's tree ?

If so, distributed SCM seems like a real pain ... if not... then how 
exactly are the two trees in this case kept in sync ?

say a project has a.c b.c c.c d.c e.c f.c

I change a.c, b.c and f.c, add g.c, which f.c now depends on.

Another guy changes c.c e.c and f.c

Then we want to do a _release_ build.... how is the potential conflict 
in f.c resolved ? How do the two developers have visibility to the 
changes in each other's repositories and ... would it not be the case 
that "Central box" would have to manually synchronise between the two 
developers... and _fix_ the breakage in f.c ?

I can't imagine that's how it works... since that's an extremely broken 
design... but, that's how the implied structure of this distributed 
model seems to work.

Perhaps you/someone could elaborate on this point a little bit ?

--
Bryan