Version Control Blog

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.

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.

Lightning talk from Bryan O’Sullivan, aired at EuroPython 2006.

This talk presents Mercurial Queue (mq), an extension to the Mercurial … all » Version Control System (VCS). Mq is used to manage a series of patches in the same way that quilt does. The main difference is its complete integration with the VCS software, so that you can manipulate the patches as changeset objects. Mq adheres to the Mercurial philosophy: it is simple to use and blazingly fast. It can manage hundreds of patches applied to a 20,000 file repository.

See Bryan O’Sullivan “Mercurial Extension: mercurial queue” at Google Video.

A Google Tech Talk by Bryan O’Sullivan, on Mercurial VCS.

Mercurial is a free distributed revision control system. It focuses on conceptual simplicity, robustness, and high performance. Well-known open source projects that use Mercurial include OpenSolaris, Xen, and One Laptop Per Child.This talk presents some of the advantages of using Mercurial to manage large, fast-moving projects. We give a brief overview of the techniques used to achieve, in Python, a level of performance that outshines most other revision control systems. Finally, we introduce some novel revision control techniques that take advantage of Mercurial’s extensibility and high performance.

Bryan O’Sullivan “Mercurial Project” at Google Video. (via Taragana Blog: “Meta Review of Mercurial Distributed Version Control System”)

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.

A well-known SCM comparison resource “Better SCM Initiative” has updated the table, adding three more version control systems: Rational ClearCase, AccuRev, and Mercurial. So, now it has a feature-by-feature breakdown comparison of nineteen systems, open-source and commercial. Sadly, it does not yet cover GIT. Read at: “Better SCM Initiative: Comparison”

John Goerzen tells a story about his evaluation of SCM tools for the following problem:

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?”

Dec 17 2006: Mercurial 0.9.3 was released. Bug fixes, documentation fixes, fixes in mq and gpg extensions. Read more at Matt Mackall: “Mercurial 0.9.3 released!”