Version Control Blog

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:

1. Reliability
2. Adaptability
3. Usability
4. Extensibility
5. Integration
6. Administration (including Total Cost of Ownership)

Read the whole series at:

• “Version Control: The Future is Adaptive;
• “It Takes a Community to Raise Great Software”;
• “Wanted: Rock Solid Version Control”;
• “Version Control: Plug-ins vs Toolkits”;
• “Version Control: Design for Integration”;

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!

Christian Neukirchen describes a useful procedure for how to set up tracking of foreign CVS repository using Git, cvsup and cvsps 2.1. He uses the Ruby CVS repository as an example. The resulting GIT repository takes 29 megabytes and contains entire Ruby development history for eight years. Read more at Tracking the Ruby CVS with Git. P.S.: I had to install newer cvsps, and to edit the CVSROOT/config file, removing LockDir config option. Give git-cvsimport a -v flag to see what it is doing.