[Nix-dev] DVCS - what we care about?

[Michael Raskin]

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What DVCS is used for? I see a few options feature-wise:

1) Continuous merge tool. Take the recent work, try to apply it into one
tree.

2) Mysterious bug recovery. Look at the previous state of a file to see
what is really changed.

3) Full project history. What, when and where was committed. Maybe with
some additional security on top of this.

4) Extra information for ease of searching interesting places in
history. For example, some people put BugID into commit messages.

Entire revision control appeared because of 2). Any DVCS (as I
understand, SVK included) gives us 1).

Now, there are some properties:

1) Small repository size
2) Reasonable network syncing behaviour
3) Portability
4) Reliability against system failures
5) Reliability w.r.t. user actions. (Dangerous things are obvious)
6) Memory consumption
7) Having any architecture behind the tool
8) Everybody (except those who did any research - like Mozilla or
FreeBSD) already uses it

Of course, if we only need features (1) and (2) and the only property we
care about is (8) then the answer is clear. On the other hand, this
approach makes me wonder why we even support any platform except Cygwin
or MinGW.

Personally I think that feature (3) is important (just not to be worse
off than with SVN) and properties (5) and (7) help working with a tool a
lot.
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