Re: [MiNT] Version control system selection

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Sunday 03 January 2010, Mark Duckworth wrote:
> On 1/3/10 4:01 PM, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> > I have to say, that CVS sucks for merging, and git (or maybe
> > subversion) is much better at this. That's a side comment though and
> > I'm not mandating a version control system change.
>
> I support a change to subversion 100%.

If CVS isn't enough, I would seriously consider switch to a distributed
version control.  Subversion is such a minuscule step forward from CVS
(atomic commits) that it's IMHO not worth the trouble.

You can script several of SVN features (like renames) on top of CVS if you
really want to (AFAIK Mozilla project did that before switching to
Mercurial). Branching in SVN is horrendous and its checkout with just
the upstream HEAD version takes more disk space than Git, Mercurial and
Bazaar checkouts take with the full reposity history.

Once you've used some of the distributed version control systems, you don't
really want to go back.

Short summary of the distributed version control systems differences:
- Bazaar: don't know much about this except that it's used by Ubuntu.
- Git: fastest, used by Linux kernel, X/freedesktop.org
- Mercurial: more user friendly than Git, with better windows support,
  used by Mozilla.org and Python (language)

Feature-wise all of these three main distributed version control systems
should be about even.

Most software hosting services (sourceforge, berlios etc) support Git.
Several have started recently to support Mercurial also.  At least Ubuntu
services (Launchpad) supports Bazaar.


Personally I prefer Mercurial (and that's what Hatari repositories use), but
as it uses Python, it might be a bit too memory hungry and slow when run
natively on lower end Atari machines.


	- Eero