At what point does the push model degrade?

[Paul Sargent]

On 16 Nov 2007, at 18:47, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

> The worst that will happen if pushing doesn't scale for you is that  
> your
> history will be cluttered with some extra unneeded merges (you can
> eliminate them from the output of "hg log" using "-M"), and people  
> will
> be frustrated and grumbly (there is no command line option for
> eliminating this).  If the latter occurs, just switch to a mostly-pull
> model.  It's not hard, and it doesn't add significant overhead.

I personally don't understand this point. A pull model requires  
somebody who's task is to act as gatekeeper/collator/manager of  
change-sets, and this naturally has to be someone higher up the  
knowledge tree. I would say that using that person for that task, and  
removing them from development, is a significant cost. Also, as Ezra  
says, if that person isn't there things break down.

> This problem isn't unique to Mercurial: any revision control system
> where you have a lot of people working out of the same tree will
> encounter the same problem.

Again, I don't think I agree. An SVN type system doesn't require  
merging unless the same file is changed, making that process far less  
likely to happen. Now I think that the way hg does it is more  
'correct' due to inter-file dependancies, but there's always a down  
side and this is it.