(git) first time Jon said something I didn't agree with :)

[background: I have a lot of admiration for Jon Corbet, kernel hacker and editor of LWN.  His writing skill, sense of humour, and clarity of thought are legendary in the Linux community]

But in http://lwn.net/Articles/382090 , Jon tried to draw a parallel between two recent heated discussions on LWN -- one in response to SVN's grandiose, disingenuous, borderline-FUDding (against DVCS), "vision" statement (hah!), and one about some UI change that Ubuntu had made.  Jon seemed to be trying to get people to calm down and be a little more mature in their reactions -- a sort of admonishment of their responses perhaps.  Considering that the last such debate I am aware of (Monty trying to steal MySQL back) did not get such a response from Jon, this was interesting.

I don't use or recommend Ubuntu anymore due to its installing Mono by default, so that discussion is out of my radar.  Reading the comments from the perspective of an all-out git fan, however, a few interesting comments stand out:

http://lwn.net/Articles/382459/ -- [...] another difference, is that the complaints about SVN are from people who want it to die and the complaints about Ubuntu are from people who want it be to be great.

http://lwn.net/Articles/382138/ -- Subversion, on the other hand, probably annoyed most people by a vision statement that implied it had a legitimate claim to be superior in those areas, which it doesn't - note that the latter found arguments (large binary blobs, among others) weren't in that statement, but that the claims it did make were at the expense of the "competition". It read like "DVCS: not simple to use, not controlled, don't support centralized work-flows". Of course that annoyed the hell out of DVCS users.  There's more good stuff in that comment, by the way.

http://lwn.net/Articles/382142/ -- The community has always responded rapidly to incorrect information. With the amount of FUD thrown our way from the outside, the responses have gotten faster and stronger. This is a good thing when the people making the false statements are companies like SCO, it's not as good when it's something like the Subversion vision statement. However I don't think that you can get one without the other.

The rest of the comments were details of how to do something or other in DVCSs and so on.  For the record, I have always suggested that folks whose main work product is binary formats like doc/xls/ppt should stick to a VCS that allows mandatory locking, such as VSS.  This holds true for OOo files also, even if they are XML underneath, so the key point is they are difficult to merge if parallel development happebs.

I also know that extremely large files do cause a problem for git, and checking out a partial tree is complicated by the SHA calculations being thrown out of gear (although in theory this *is* solvable).