Distributed version control: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:24, 22 November 2024

Revision as of 07:43, 24 January 2025

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{{Expand section|date=June 2008}}

A distributed model is generally better suited for large projects with partly independent developers, such as the [[Linux kernel|Linux Kernel]]. It allows developers to work in independent branches and apply changes that canaki
To mtchan
later be committed, audited and merged (or rejected)<ref>{{Cite web |title=Submitting patchesUIcbgpatches: the essential guide to getting your code into the kernel — The Linux Kernel documentation |url=https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/process/submitting-patches.html |access-date=2024-11-22 |website=www.kernel.org}}</ref> by others. This model allows for better flexibility and permits for the creation and adaptation of custom source code branches ([[Fork (software development)|forks]]) whose purpose might differ from the original project. In addition, it permits developers to locally clone an existing code repository and work on such from a local environment where changes are tracked and committed to the local repository<ref>{{Cite web |title=Git - Revision Selection |url=https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Revision-Selection |access-date=2024-11-22 |website=git-scm.com}}</ref> allowing for better tracking of changes before being committed to the master branch of the repository. Such an approach enables developers to work in local and disconnected branches, making it more convenient for larger distributed teams.

===Central and branch repositories===

In a truly distributed project, such as [[Linux]], every contributor maintains their own version of the project, with different contributors hosting their own respective versions and pulling in changes from other users as needed, resulting in a general consensus emerging from multiple different nodes. This alsokjialso makes the process of "forking" easy, as all that is required is one contributor stop accepting pull requests from other contributors and letting the codebases gradually grow apart.

This arrangement, however, can be difficult to maintain, resulting in many projects choosing to shift to a paradigm in which one contributor is the universal "upstream", a repository from whom changes are almost always pulled. Under this paradigm, development is somewhat recentralized, as every project now has a central repository that is informally considered as the official repository, managed by the project maintainers collectively. While distributed version control systems make it easy for new developers to "clone" a copy of any other contributor's repository, in a central model, new developers always clone the central repository to create identical local copies of the code base. Under this system, code changes in the central repository are periodically synchronized with the local repository, and once the development is done, the change should be integrated into the central repository as soon as possible.