

Dealing with forks in a DVCS - defunkt
http://ozmm.org/posts/forking_continued.html

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davidw
[ Don't know if I'll write another blog post about this subject, so in the
meantime, I'll answer here ]

The network graph things look like cool technology, but I am not convinced -
perhaps you're looking at things from too much of a github centric view?
That's easy when you live and breathe something. "The Google" is where most of
us still start looking.

> It may seem strange, and perhaps even like a lot of work.

It does seem like an awful lot of work!

> In the old model, actionwebservice wouldn’t have made it past 1.2.6. Welcome
> to distributed version control.

That's not necessarily true. DHH or whoever could add the datanoise people as
committers on the RubyForge project, where they could happily continue to work
on the 'canonical' version. There are plenty of projects where that has
happened, with the torch being passed, and the code moving forward.

~~~
defunkt
> The network graph things look like cool technology, but I am not convinced -
> perhaps you're looking at things from too much of a github centric view?
> That's easy when you live and breathe something. "The Google" is where most
> of us still start looking.

I concede to that, and we're interested in attacking that problem, too. It's
easier for us to start with GitHub though.

> That's not necessarily true. DHH or whoever could add the datanoise people
> as committers on the RubyForge project, where they could happily continue to
> work on the 'canonical' version. There are plenty of projects where that has
> happened, with the torch being passed, and the code moving forward.

But he didn't, and that's the point.

Everyone could also maintain their projects indefinitely, reviewing and
merging in all the good patches. But they don't. DVCS answers the "but they
could have..." hypothetical situations in the classic model with real
solutions. datanoise could have continued development without DHH's
permission, and he did. Someone can, in the future, do the same to him.

------
defunkt
While this may come off as a GitHub ad, it's the site and DVCS I'm most
qualified to discuss. The questions promiscuous forking raise are technology
independent and we've been thinking about them since day one.

