Hey, I just read the thoughtful piece by Anil Dash at http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/forking-is-a-feature.html. I don't really agree or disagree with his points, but it's an interesting take on the value of distributed version control and the evolution of how open source communities get work done.
I tried to find the official position of the ASF on this topic, but unfortunately, the "How it Works" links are broken on the site (see http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-2981). I did find, in the "glossary", a section on "Revolution": > **In the Apache environment, some communities may decide to permit (or > encourage) *revolutions* as ways of reconciling differences, particularly > code changes which have been blocked on a particular branch by a veto. > Originally described by James Duncan Davison in his 'Rules for > Revolutionaries,' the concept has been adopted, formally or informally, by > at least one Apache > project<http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html#Project>. > Essentially, a revolution occurs when a group of committers decides to fork > the current main branch in order to work on problematic code or concepts. > This permits them to pursue it without disturbing the evolutionary work on > the main branch. A revolutionary branch may eventually be merged back into > the main branch, die out, split completely and become a new main branch, or > may absorb the current main branch into itself (essentially no different > than the first option). See the 'Rules for > Revolutionaries<http://incubator.apache.org/learn/rules-for-revolutionaries.html>' > and compare > *evolution*<http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html#Evolution> > . In the Apache Hadoop project, we've adopted the potential for revolutions, which we manage as Subversion branches. Unfortunately, maintaining a Subversion branch is expensive, and merging it back into trunk can be quite difficult. For projects which have sanctioned "revolutions", it may be useful to allow them to use git or another dvcs as the primary version control system. Similarly, for projects with several large commercial backers, each maintaining their own patch sets or source repositories (e.g. Apache Hadoop, with Yahoo, Cloudera, and soon, Facebook working separately), a distributed version control system could be useful. I'd love to hear the reactions of other ASF members to the piece. I'd also love to be directed to previous discussions on the topic, as I know that adopting git for some projects has been discussed previously. Thanks, Jeff
