[Numpy-discussion] Moving away from svn ?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

Fernando Perez <fperez.net <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Incidentally, the emacs guys seem to be worrying about the same thing:
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/85893
>
> If they actually do the work of comparing tools, that work may be
> useful for us.  I'm pretty sure that any tool that can handle the
> entire history of emacs can chew on numpy/scipy/ipython/matplotlib
> *combined* for breakfast.

The discussions on emacs-devel are interesting indeed.  I've been
keeping my own local Emacs patches (to make it build on FreeBSD as a
port) in a Mercurial repository for a fair amount of time now, and it
seems to work "ok".

One interesting datapoint is that the entire history of the "HEAD"
branch of the repository of Emacs can fit in 141 MB, which is smaller
than a full checkout of Emacs plus object code after a build, and it
takes less than 2 seconds to look at the log of the first commit done in
CVS ever:

  kobe % du -sk ~/tmp/emacs-src
  187436  /home/keramida/tmp/emacs-src
  kobe % pwd
  /home/keramida/hg/emacs/gnu
  kobe % du -sk .hg
  141620  .hg
  kobe % /usr/bin/time hg log -r0
  changeset:   0:c67c006134ec
  user:        jimb
  date:        Thu Apr 18 00:48:29 1985 +0000
  summary:     entered into RCS

          1.72 real         1.40 user         0.29 sys
  kobe %

I'm sure that this is far from a "killer feature", but at least it shows
that there's no huge obstacle in using Hg to check-out and browse the
history of a repository the size of Emacs' CVS tree.

I don't know if Emacs will use Mercurial or some other DVCS, but it
should be certainly "do-able".

Just my two cents,
Giorgos