(Except that I use svn instead of git, but that really doesn't matter).

I'd disagree a little bit with that (in the context of abandoned modules and public repositories (and in general because git and hg are just cooler than SVN, but I digress :)).

If you're using something hosted in SVN you're at the mercy of the repository host, since the project history lives in that one location. If they go walkabout / get hit by a bus / take their ball and go home you lose the project's history unless people have been maintaining their own mirror of the entire repository. Whereas with git (or hg, or any of the new distributed systems) every contributor has the entire history and every repository is just as good as the "master" as soon as you've pulled in any remote changes.

As for making contributing easy, git has a builtin command that bundles up a revision list into ready-to-email patches. There's also a corresponding command for taking an mbox of patches and conditionally pulling them in for the upstream. Or the prospective committer can just put their repo up and say "Hey, I've done X. Look at branch test-X at git://mybox.example.com/snork and see what you think".

There's also a security aspect (not the exact word I'm looking for, but ...) in that it's harder to monkey with project history since revision identifiers are cryptographically determined from change contents (in git and hg it's using cryptographically secure hashes; I believe monotone goes even further in that updates are signed using public keys). Linus alludes to this in his talk at google in that he can lose his entire copy of the kernel source, but if the copy he gets from J. Random Schmuck matches his last good HEAD revision id he knows the contents are the same as what he had to that point.

Did I mention git is just cooler than SVN? :)

PS: Git. Git git git.

Git.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

In reply to Re^4: Losing faith in CPAN - unresponsive module authors (ownership--) by Fletch
in thread Losing faith in CPAN - unresponsive module authors by andreas1234567

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