Re: VCS comparison table

Dear diary, on Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:56:22AM CEST, I got a letter
where Sean [off-list ref] said that...

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 18:44:11 -0400
Aaron Bentley [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Plugins also don't have a Bazaar's rigid release cycle, testing
requirements and coding conventions, so they are a convenient way to try
out an idea, before committing to the effort of getting it merged into
the core.

Hmm.. It's pretty easy to test out Git ideas too.  People do it all
the time, and without plugins.  Junio maintains several such trees
for instance.  Dunno.. I just think plugs _sounds_ good to developers
without much real benefit to users over regular ole source code.

I think this is just another cultural difference. Git comes from the
kernel environment (although it is currently used in far more
environments than just the kernel and kernel-related stuff) and the
_kernel_'s development style is that you want to get as much stuff as
possible inside the kernel, and on the other hand don't care at all
about breaking in-kernel APIs and such.

The Git "plumbing" is very much the "kernel". We aren't as much
interested in having support for external bits of code poking in the Git
innards, we would much rather have them integrated into Git as soon as
possible rather than live around externally. OTOH, the "kernel" gives a
very flexible ("UNIXy") API to the writhing mass of porcelain scripts you
may call the "userland".

I'm not saying it must be always sharply better approach than the
plugin-encouraging approach. It's just as it is. (Also, another reason
is probably a purely technical one, it is much easier to have pluggable
functions in scripting languages that support "monkey-patching", than
have them in C, since you actually need to explicitly add all the hooks
etc. So in Python, from a large part you get the plugin support for
free.)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
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