Re: VCS comparison table

Hi,

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Charles Duffy wrote:

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

you neatly clipped the most important part of my email: I quoted you 
saying that plugins can even change core behaviour!

quoted

So, the wonderful upside of plugins you described here are actually the
reason I will never, _never_ use bzr with plugins.

I presume that for this reason you will also never, _never_ use a 
non-mainline branch of git -- even if its actual code only touches UI 
enhancements or something similarly non-core

NO! The point was that I will not gladly run anything which could change 
the core. If I know it touches only the UI, there is no problem.

If I get a shell script using git-core programs to do its job, I 
_know_ that my repository will not be fscked afterwards.

And _that_ was the whole point of my email.

And that you will never, _never_ use third-party wrappers because they 
might play LD_PRELOAD tricks. Or run any software with root privileges 
you haven't personally written. Or...

Most of it comes down to trust. And yes, you are correct, I will not run 
git with some obscure module LD_PRELOADed that some guy from some planet 
sent me.

You might have missed my argument being about the SCM, and not the 
universe and all the rest.

The claim that an extensibility mechanism should be rejected wholesale 
on account of being excessively powerful, on the other hand, is just 
silly.

Oh, but NO! An extensibility mechanism which allows for a fragile system 
_is_ silly. Not my rejection of it.

Just take an example (illustrating that once again, one should not 
attribute everything to malevolence...): I write a plugin for bzr. It does 
really wonderful things, it even cooks you dinner.

Only that I happened to make a small mistake (if you followed some threads 
on the git list, you'd know that small mistakes are a hobby of mine), and 
by this mistake, your repository is ... gone. Small mistake, big 
consequence. That is wrong with such a powerful system which caters for 
developers, which are human after all.

Note that such a small mistake would be much more likely caught in git: if 
it touches the core, plenty of eyes look at it.

Ciao,
Dscho