Dave Dribin wrote a couple of posts on choosing between the usual suspects: Mercurial, Bazaar and Git. Well-written, recommended.
Read at: Choosing a Distributed Version Control System; follow-up: Why I Chose Mercurial.
Mark Shuttleworth (of Thawte, Ubuntu, and Canonical fames) wrote four posts on rename tracking feature in version control systems, and its impact on merging as a social process.
Read at his blog:
Those posts caught a lot of attention back in June, but frankly it seems to me the issue is somewhat overrated (but nevertheless a recommended reading). Mark’s Canonical Ltd. supports the development of Bazaar. Bazaar has the discussed feature of merging with renames tracking. Git does not have it, but it has another argument in this discussion: huge merging traffic — Linux kernel development is all about merging, and the codebase is huge. So, I guess this feature is not that crucial: Linus is well-known by his uncompromising approach to tools.
Ian Clatworthy, one of the primary developers of Bazaar, has posted a series of articles on version control in broad modern context.
His primary thesis is:
Beyond market acceptance, there are 6 main criteria I consider when evaluating collaboration tools:
- Reliability
- Adaptability
- Usability
- Extensibility
- Integration
- Administration (including Total Cost of Ownership)
Read the whole series at:
Couple of memorable quotes:
Likewise, in the field of collaboration, I think there are 5 interesting numbers: 1, 2, 10, 100 and 1000. These numbers represent:
- an Individual
- a Partnership
- a Team
- a Company
- a Community
[…]
As a young software engineer back in the early 90s, 10s of thousands of people woke up to cold showers in Sydney one morning because of a corner-case bug in my code controlling the off peak hot water system. That sort of event tends to have a life long impact on how one designs software!
Launchpad offers a web-based repository browser, including changesets, and offers the ability to subscribe to any branch it knows about. You get emails on distributed commits. This is a beautiful thing! Anyone who has worked with distributed VCS’s has probably had the feeling that they are seeing development through a keyhole, that there’s a whole world out there that’s not easily visible or comprehensible. Launchpad offers the possibility of tying together the various development branches out there in the wild in one place, effectively removing the last advantage of centralized version control.Go to Launchpad.net. (via wingolog.org: “Launchpad”)
Those of you who have used version control systems for a long time, or anything which has to diff extensively for that matter, know that once in a while they completely bungle a diff and give output which is, to put it charitably, extremely confusing. Coming up with an algorithm which reliably gives good diffs is far from trivial, but is a problem which has now thankfully been solved. If you get the latest version of bazaar and use its diff utility it will give reasonable diff output on almost anything. All other version control systems (and I mean all others) should switch to using bazaar’s diff algorithm as a swap-in replacement, a change which has essentially no downside. (It also has better asymptotic runtime, and code which is easier to understand and debug.)Later in comments he briefly explain new algorithm:
Instead of doing a longest common subsequence on everything, it does a longest common subsequence on lines which occur exactly once on both sides, then recurses between lines which got matched on that pass.Read at: Bram Cohen: “The diff problem has been solved”. I’d like to try it out when it becomes available for Subversion or Git.
tunneling to the SmartServer via HTTP, per-configuration-key policy settings, short svn-style status reports, and other improvements. Bazzar homepage is at http://bazaar-vcs.org/.
One of my tests was a real problem: I wanted to track the Linux 2.6.16.x kernel tree, apply the Xen patches to it, and pull only specific patches (for the qla2xxx driver) from 2.6.17.x into this local branch. I wanted also to be able to upgrade to 2.6.17.x later (once Xen supports it) and have the version control system properly track which patches I already have.John Goerzen “Whose Distributed VCS Is The Most Distributed?”
