Talk:Open writing projects/Scientific Programming with Python and Subversion

Why subversion? Why not git? Subversion is centralized sourcing, and git is decentralized sourcing, but you can still get and push updates and so on. I've brought this up because I was browsing through the owwpythonbook group and was wondering. -- Bryan Bishop 16:36, 17 May 2008 (EDT)

Also, a good name to cite is mentioned at the top of neuralensemble.org, Gregory V. Wilson, Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?. Apparently not many researchers know about source code repositories, revision control, etc. Yikes. -- Bryan Bishop 16:36, 17 May 2008 (EDT)

git vs. subversion

Julius B. Lucks 17:33, 17 May 2008 (EDT): Hi Bryan, thanks for the comment. I actually use git for all of my projects and much prefer it over subversion. However, git is still not very easy to learn, and in my experience of explaining it to people, it can be hard to grasp at first. One of the main goals of the book is to be pedagogical and towards that goal, subversion offers a more simple experience with much more community support and external resources than git. That said, another one of our goals is to write a 'modular' book - the concepts we want to get across should be general and completely independent of subversion or git or whatever technology comes along. The book will have code snippets clearly demarcated so that if a young intrepid git user comes along, they can easily re-write the code examples in git and link to the book and viola we have a book with python and git! This should hold for all of the technologies used in the book, and we hope this experience in modular writing works.