A few months ago, I started playing around with the ruby-wmii codebase, trying to get it to work with the newest version of wmii. I eventually succeeded, but that’s not what this post is about.

Mauricio Ferndandez, the awesome guy who originally created ruby-wmii, uses darcs for most of his projects, ruby-wmii included. Since I wanted to muck with ruby-wmii and send patches back, I had to give it a try as well.

Until that point, I’d never really used any revision control system other than Subversion. I’d checked out some stuff from CVS, but never made a commit to anything that used it. Not that it’s all that different from Subversion anyway.

I’ve been playing around with distributed revision control recently. I have another post in the works all about that, so I’ll skip over the details for now.

The upshot of my adventures is that I’m pretty much convinced that there’s almost no reason to use a client-server system rather than a distributed one¹. Distributed systems have all of the capabilities of client-server systems, and more besides.

So you can imagine my pleasure when Hampton IMed me a few days ago saying “What do you think about moving Haml to Git?” I replied that I thought that was a fantastic idea.

It’s rare that I consciously want to adopt something before I even try it. Usually, it goes more like this:

• Friend: x is really awesome.
• Nathan: I’ll bet.
• Friend: You should give it a try.
• Nathan: I’m sure.
• Friend: I’m serious! It’s much more fun/shiny/tasty than that y thing you’re using.
• Nathan: I like y.
• Friend: Gah! I give up!
• Nathan tries x.
• Nathan ends up loving x.

Sometimes this takes a couple tries, but it’s happened enough times that I can see the pattern. It’s why I’m using Linux and Google Reader, and how I developed a taste for salmon.