Re: Version control

On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:43:02 +1100
Daniel Pittman <[email protected]> wrote:

> Erik de Castro Lopo <[email protected]> writes:
> > Alan L Tyree wrote:
> >
> >> Looking for some advice. I have used RCS version control for
> >> writing LaTeX documents for some time, but am looking at the
> >> advantages of using a distributed version control system.
> >>
> >> Are there any serious advantages of one over the other?
> 
> Yes, some social and some technical.
> 
> >> I have played around a little bit with Bazaar, but would like to
> >> make sure before I commit (oh!) to one system or another.
> >
> > I have used GNU Arch
> 
> Don't do it!  You don't need that much pain in your life.  Very user
> hostile UI, and not very popular.
> 
> > Bzr
> 
> This is quite a reasonable choice, being the number three DVCS out
> there.  Canonical, and so Ubuntu, make extensive use of it, and it is
> probably the most user friendly tool.
> 
> Performance was abysmal, compared to either Mercurial or git, since it
> took at least a couple of seconds, cache hot, to do *anything* on my
> machine.  It ran respectably, though, after that initial startup cost.
> 
> Oh, and expect to play "repository format of the month" to gain access
> to the various features: they had two or three active repository
> formats in any given release, when I was actively using it, with
> slightly discontinuous feature sets.
> 
> Oh, and it plays well with SVN upstream repositories.
> 
> > CVS
> 
> Don't touch it.  Also, not a DVCS.
> 
> > Darcs
> 
> This is an interesting tool.  Their theoretical underpinnings are very
> strong, and allow various features that are hard to manage with other
> tools; instead of a linear or acyclic graph of development Darcs
> models the repository as a series of independent acyclic graphs of
> patches.
> 
> It also has a fanatically faithful following; this is one of those
> tools you either love to bits, or you find it vaguely strange that
> people care that much.
> 
> They had, for an awfully long time, a number of livelock problems,
> which they may /finally/ have resolved, but hadn't a few months back
> when I looked.
> 
> Performance is also dreadful when merging with other repositories,
> since they have some greater than O(n^2) work to do in some cases.
> 
> > Git
> 
> Using the 1.5 or 1.6 releases, this is relatively user-friendly,
> although not close to Mercurial or Bzr.  Performance is amazingly
> good, and the design makes it possible to do very cool things.
> 
> This is the number one DVCS out there, in terms of popularity, and
> supports more or less any development model.  Unless you use Windows,
> of course, at which point it more or less sucks.
> 
> I use this, personally, and would generally recommend it for
> development teams on Unix, but not for situations where
> non-developers needed to work with the VCS.
> 
> > Hg
> 
> Very user friendly, and great performance.  This is the number two
> DVCS out there, and has a number of cool features that I miss now I
> have moved to git.
> 
> It has a lot of big project backing, and is generally an excellent
> choice.  The design is also excellent and well backed, technically.
> 
> > Perforce
> 
> Non-free, a royal PITA, only vaguely a DVCS, overshadowed by other
> tools.  If you really need to work with it the git-p4 support is
> probably a better bet than the real client...
> 
> > SVN
> 
> Not a DVCS, but an excellent choice for some uses.  The model is
> conceptually simple, Windows support is great, and it doesn't have
> many features, so it doesn't confuse less technical users.
> 
> I recommend this when you need a simple "master" repository as the
> heart of the project; developers can use the Bzr or git SVN
> integration to get access to a highly-featured tool, and
> non-technical users can talk directly to SVN.
> 
> Um, don't use SVK though, because it sucks.
> 
> > and probably some others.
> 
> Not that are worth considering.
> 
> > I find them all a PITA, but of all the ones I've tried, Bzr is the
> > least painful :-).
> 
> That would be about right, with Hg next and then ... it varies.
> 
> > BTW, I would have thought this was appropriate content for the main
> > SLUG list.
> 
> Yeah, I think it would have been.
> 
> Anyway, Alan, did you have some specific questions?

I think they have been more or less answered. In looking at the
websites of the different ones, they all look alike to the
non-professional.

I will just be using it for personal use, so a lot of the
features probably don't worry me too much. I just want something easy
to use that helps me organise and coordinate my writing between the
desk and several laptops.

I have used RCS for some time. I do nearly all of my writing in emacs,
so the vc mode takes care of most of the hassle as long as I stay on the
one machine.

But the real problem is synching the desk and laptops. A
simple synch program does not do it since I am always overwriting one
or the other - rsync helps here, but still easy to screw up.

That is my REAL problem - it just seemed to me that DVCS was a way to
solve it.

Thanks for the help,
Alan

> 
> Regards,
>         Daniel
> -- 
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-- 
Alan L Tyree                    http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
Tel:  04 2748 6206              Fax: +61 2 4782 7092

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