Horde3D

It would be really nice to have a distributed version control system instead of subversion. That way it would be way easier to create local patches for later submission: I could still rely on version control to try something out - and if it did not work just revert it.
The other solution "giving everybody commit rights" on subversion is just wrong...

I'd suggest git. So far I'm still learning more about it, but it works good.
A minimal introduction for subversion users is here: http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html

Comments?

The problem is that someone (presumably marciano) would have to spend at least as much time merging the branches as they currently spend on developing - which would slow the whole process down immeasurably. It is already possible to create branches in SVN if someone needs to develop an API-breaking change in place - but even simpler is just to use multiple working copies at the same time.

Also, while I would expect many people to develop extensions to Horde (and to a lesser extent, semi-ports, such as for OpenGL ES), only a couple of people are likely to be developing the core engine - it is after all pretty much feature complete. Better to serialise any patches through Marciano and/or Volker, so they can keep the engine on track and make sure of code quality, etc.

AFAIK, git doesn't offer any features over svn, except for the patch by mail stuff - which is pretty much identical to diff/patch on a working copy, so isn't needed as a separate feature.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

I already suggested Mercurial, but there doesn't seem to be any interest from other developers. I myself am a big believer in distributed version control, as it is even *SIMPLER* and more powerful than centralized version control, but most people either don't realize it or don't care.

Perhaps we could set up a community operated distributed repository, and merge the changes from svn trunk as they are made and go from there.

swiftcoder:
I can understand your concerns. I did not intend to work on the core engine, but even when I'm working on something as the documentation it is really nice to have a version control.
I'll try to illustrate it: I fixed some small issues - 64 bit, linking, a makefile. Now I can create a patch with subversion - that's good. But then I started to work on the file format document. My patch got really messed up by that. Now I have two different checkouts, with different patches inside. One for the fixes and one for the documentation. Since that's impractical too, I just put the _formats.html file into my own repository where I can work on it with commit rights.
git offers more features then just the email thing Just try committing in subversion while you are offline / have no commit rights on the central repository.

Vurlix:
I can create a git mirror on my server. For the start a sync once a day should be enough and will not stress the sourceforge servers in any way.
As an alternative I'm going to read more about using git-svn locally - that will probably be enough for now. But I see the advantage of a git repository with community applied patches, even if everybody uses his own repository for that. github and gitorious would be good places to have our own repositories while I provide a mirror of svn if that's not possible with those websites.

I don't think that we will switch the version control system. I agree with swiftcoder, that we will prefer posting patches, that we can then integrate in the engine.

I have created a git mirror of svn trunk which is updated daily:
http://github.com/fnoeding/horde3d-svn-mirror/tree

My own (public viewable) git repositories are here:
http://server2.noeding.net/gitweb/
My Horde3D repo contains for example my D and Python bindings.