Joey, you're probably one of the people in the best position to talk about this one. How do the other DVCSs work for extremely simple, lightweight uses such as keeping a blog, a /bin directory full of miscellaneous scripts, or tracking the config files on a laptop? New people sometimes get drawn into tweaking around the edges, then become core participants.

I have to be honest, I just don't see convergence to a single VCS happening, not anytime soon, anyway. I think what we're going to see is the business world is going to continue moving towards Subversion for internal projects, as businesses still like to maintain the control they get with a centralized VCS. Additionally, SVN still has a big win over pretty much any other open source VCS in terms of documentation and available tools. Current SVN users who desire a distributed option have SVK, which can be useful.

In the Free Software world, I see a strong movement towards the DVCS's, which makes sense, as a DVCS really shines in the very distributed development style that is common there. However, I don't think there will be a single winner. There's too many large and high profile projects that are still adopting multiple different VCS's. And oftentimes there's good reason to pick one over the other. For example, while git gets lots of attention right now, and is particularly popular for Linux-only projects, it is considered a very poor choice for cross-platform projects, and has been rejected repeatedly by large projects that don't make non-Linux/unix platforms a second class citizen (the Mozilla projects, for example). MySQL just switched to bzr, and Canonical is pushing it's use within Ubuntu, while Sun has standardized on Mercurial for most of their projects. The two I do currently see falling behind in mindshare are Darcs and Monotone (which is rather too bad, because I really like some of the design ideas in Monotone). GNU Arch is basically legacy, and most of it's users have moved on, I think, with bzr being a common choice due to it's history.

I definitely see compatibility as a feature that is more and more desired, though. Most of the DVCS's either have, or are building, support for working natively with SVN repositories, which is an excellent start. This makes SVN an attractive repository format for a project that wants to allow maximum freedom in VCS choice. I'm also seeing the various DVCS's adding native support for some of their competitors repositories, too. I've also seen a project or two out there specifically for translating changesets/patchsets between different version systems, further easing compatibility. -- Christopher Cashell

On the subject of second-class citizenship... MinGW merge thread on the msysGit newsgroup. The Microsoft Windows issue might not be hanging over git's head much longer. -- Don Marti

And... which package is this? :)

Cheers,

Oh. This page doesn't exist yet! Some interloper (me), is going to create it.

?NewUserSurprises ?FeatureList

That's a really nice yurt. Thanks for sharing the photos. I predict it won't stay white for long if you leave it pitched under trees. :-) -- Dave Holland

Or you could just avoid passphraseless SSH keys entirely, and instead use passphrase-protected SSH keys and ssh-agent. libpam-ssh makes it trivial to use ssh-agent. -- [unknown]

I'm not sure what problem is being solved here. Why are we considering separate identities per program? Is the answer not to use one identity, and use 'ssh-agent' to store the key passphrase for any commands that need ssh in the entire session? —bignose

ssh-agent is not useful when things are being run from cron.

If this is for automated backup purposes (... or something similar), I just write a shell script for the particular task that needs to be done (no parameters accepted) and restrict the passwordless key to that. At least this way, I don't have to worry about input validation, at all. -- novakyu

Ah, okay. The list of things being done didn't look especially like scheduled tasks, hence my question of what problem was being solved. I agree that for unattended access, a passphraseless key with a 'command="doonething",from="foo.example.org"' option set in the 'authorized_keys' file is probably best. —bignose

Searchable archives. Sane threading. Choice of configurable client program. Aggregation of many forums into a single client interface. Sure beats "web forums". -- bignose

You wrote <shock> at the end of your blog post, but the HTML scrubber removed it. -- edward

But you only just made a commit to the games team, and we've lost you already? :) ?JonDowland

I don't think anyone taught me that those UIs are hard. I think they're just hard.

They're no harder than following a game trail in the woods -- which is quite hard if you've not spent time in the woods. The real problem is that we think of a steep learning curve as bad. --Joey

What local ISP do you use that offers fiber?

I'm in the odd situation of living in a small town that has not one, but two competing fiber to the home systems. I'm signing up with BTES, the local power/now-everything-else company. --Joey

I read it as "please find the nin.com mail from your spambox, wasn't that bad :)