Version Control Blog

Yesterday Git 1.6.0 was released. Please read full announcement and changelog.

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.

Important opinions from Subversion developers:

Karl Fogel: “Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future”

Ben Collins-Sussman: “The Risks of Distributed Version Control”

Git 1.5.3 was released by Junio Hamano on Sep 3rd. Read more at:

• few selected new features by Garry Dolley;
• more on git stash feature, by Jonathan Tron;
• original announcement by Junio Hamano, with detailed changelog;

git stash is similar to shelving feature of Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

Garry Dolley posted the module for Capistrano (that’s Ruby on Rails deployment tool) which allows it to use Git as the source control system.

Read more and download at “Capistrano 2.0 with Git shared repository”.

Zack Rusin created useful Git cheat sheet.

See “Git cheat sheet” for several sizes.

There is also a similar Mercurial cheat sheet at http://www.ivy.fr/mercurial/ref/v1.0/

Thank you, Robert.

Linus Torvalds, in a long excellent e-mail reply to KDE developer Adam Treat, writes about social and technical issues of decentralized version control systems, as applied to huge software projects like Linux and KDE.

Read at LWN.net: “Re: clarification on git, central repositories and commit access lists”.

Drupal development team has released Drupal 5.2 on July 26, 2007. It fixes two security vulnerabilities, so it is highly recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible. Many Drupal installations often contain extra Drupal modules, and almost always the also contain local customizations.

Question arises: how to upgrade your Drupal installations

• timely,
• safely,
• with confidence that none of your local customizations are lost;
• without need to remember each line that was edited and re-applying those edits to new version;
• without need to drastically change your workflow (very little discipline is needed actually);

We show that Git solves those problems easily. (more…)

At Google Tech Talk Linus Torvalds talks about source control management and Git in particular. See also: Transcript of the talk. (via Códice Software Blog: “Linus Torvalds on GIT and SCM”)

J. Paul Reed, a build engineer for Mozilla, writes an account on choosing the version control system for Mozilla development, instead of traditional CVS. The article is filled with digitally enhanced screenshots from Mortal Kombat II, illustrating the story. Mercurial is current favorite (but not the winner). Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, and Monotone were considered. Highlights:

• Git is inappropriate for cross-platform projects due to its UNIX-centric nature; same goes for Monotone;
• Mercurial had lots of initial troubles with import of Mozilla repository, which is huge and complicated;
• Bazaar imports well, but extremely slowly: more than a month for trunk-only part of Mozilla repository;

Read at: Version Control System Shootout Redux Redux. See also: Mozilla Version Control System Requirements.