Version Control Blog

GIT 1.6.0 released

squadette — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:59:16 +0000

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

Paul Duvall “Continuous Integration”

squadette — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:48:36 +0000

Continuous Integration was popularized by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck. It is so tightly integrated with version control system (”Maintain a Single Source Repository”, “Everyone Commits Every Day”, “Don’t Commit Broken Code” are basic practices of CI), that it clearly deserves mentioning here. Martin Fowler wrote an overview article: “Continuous Integration”.

“Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk” is the book by Paul Duvall which was published in Martin Fowler signature series. You may find sample chapters online:

Chapter II. “Introducing Continuous Integration” on the book website http://integratebutton.com/;
Chapter VI. “Continuous Testing” on Infoq.com.

Dave Dribin: “Choosing a Distributed Version Control System”

squadette — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:50:08 +0000

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.

SCM systems comparison: a better frontend

squadette — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:55:27 +0000

We’ve reorganized the information from the famous Better SCM: Comparison project, and presented it in a more useful way.

Announcing: Version control systems comparison 2.0.

You may compare any number of systems against each other. See for example:

TODO: add (at least) Git, PlasticSCM and Microsoft TFS information to the original Better SCM database and re-import it here. Stay tuned for updates.

AccuRev streams vs branches

squadette — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:10:19 +0000

Damon Poole (CTO of AccuRev) wrote a teaser post in AccuRev blog about AccuRev streams: Damon Poole: “Streams vs Branches”.

This article links to a whitepaper: Damon Poole: “Stream-based architecture for SCM.

As far as I understood from the first reading, idea of streams is very straightforward and simple concept making “streams of development” a first-class object in AccuRev repository. Streams are very easily presented on UI level, making them easily understood for software developer and release manager. Branches, tags, and private workspaces could be superseded by various flavors of streams.

E.g. “Release 4.0″ is a stream. “Release 4.0.1″ is the child stream. Changes made in 4.0.1 could be “promoted” to 4.0. When we start the “5.0″ line of development, it automatically gets everything that was promoted to 4.0, either from older version or from bug-fix version (4.0.x).

I understand that streams could be enormously useful if they actually do the merging well. Technically this is handled easily by modern standards. Something like this could be done (and may be is already done) in many GUI clients for most open source version control systems.

Second part of the whitepaper is dedicated to AccuRev TimeSafe, which is the underlying repository format. I have to remark that the article only compares TimeSafe features with CVS and ClearCase repository features. Those are embarrasingly easy targets for criticism. Why are modern repository formats such as Subversion FSFS and Git not mentioned? Are they technically superior? ;)

Article on Timesafe: Damon B. Poole “The Timesafe Property - A Formal Statement of Immutability in CM”.

Karl Fogel: “Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology”

squadette — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 19:30:26 +0000

Second chapter in O’Reilly book “Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think” was written by Karl Fogel, and is called “Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology”. Karl has put this chapter online under the free license.

Read this chapter online: rants.org: “Beautiful Code Chapter Now Online”.

Robin Luckey: “The World’s Oldest Source Code Repositories”

squadette — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:17:56 +0000

Robin Luckey of Ohloh.net gathered information on oldest public source code repositories. Top three are:

BRL-CAD, started in April 1983;
GNU Emacs, April 1985;
GCC, the GNU Complier Collection, November 1988;

Read the article at Ohloh.net: “The World’s Oldest Source Code Repositories”.

Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick: “Subversion Worst Practices”

squadette — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:30:09 +0000

Short talk on Subversion misuse: “Subversion Worst Practices”.

Karl Fogel, Ben Collins-Sussman, on distributed version control

squadette — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 21:07:44 +0000

Important opinions from Subversion developers:

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

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

Tim O’Reilly: Why Congress Needs a Version Control System

squadette — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 09:41:49 +0000

Tim O’Reilly, together with Karl Fogel, discussed the idea of version control for U. S. Congress.

It turns out that Tasmania seems to have implemented something similar, as described in article by Timothy Arnold-Moore “XML for legislation drafting, management and Web delivery—How structured document representation facilitates automatic processing”, published in Novemeber 1998 (found via Bex Huff).

We have already covered similar topic back in March: Slashdot: Source Control for Bills in Congress.