As I already had the chance to write in a previous post, I really appreciate distributed version control systems; I consistently use them at work and for many of my side projects. I typically switch between git and mercurial repositories, with the former being my primary choice lately, and there is one specific command that always troubles me when I do that: pull.
There is one wonderful piece of inconsistency between the two systems, one that often leads to confusion for new adopters and unnecessary hassle for experienced users. If you are familiar with both systems, you may already be thinking about the culprits. If you are not, you may be more careful about the pull and fetch commands after reading this post.
I had been thinking about the idea behind this post for a while now, but reading this post about getting newbies involved in open source just convinced me to write it down.
Being a concept developed in the Open Source world, it is no wonder that distributed revision control systems give their best in that context. There are many pros and cons, that other people described in detail better than I can do. Of all the features they offer, however, the one I prefer is the least technical one, and it is related to the way they encourage new developers to contribute to open source projects. In that perspective, git and mercurial are a lot more effective than svn, for example.
It all comes as a side effect of authors and committers being two different roles. This can encourage new contributors, who are approaching a new project for the first time, and individuals who may not have the time and energy to dedicate long periods of their time to a project, but may be able to contribute with just a few patches.
How GitHub displays both the author and the committer of a single change. Oh, and yes, there is something wrong with the dates. 😉 Think about that. Recognition is one of the most important drivers for Open Source contributors but, unfortunately, centralized revision control (subversion, CVS and the like) doesn’t help in giving credit to newcomers or occasional contributors.
That’s because, generally, sending a single patch (or even a few of them) is not enough to be granted commit access to a project repository (and rightly so) and the commit itself must be done by a project member with enough privileges.