Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems

ChelleChelle writes "During the past half-decade there has been an explosion of creativity in revision-control software, complicating the task of determining which tool to use to track and manage the complexity of a project as it evolves. Today, leaders of teams are faced with a bewildering array of choices ranging from Subversion to the more popular Git and Mercurial. It is important to keep in mind that whether distributed or centralized, all revision-control systems come with a complicated set of trade-offs. Each tool emphasizes a distinct approach to working and collaboration, which in turn influences how the team works. This article outlines how to go about finding the best match between tool and team."

Comments

Re:Git and Mercurial?

[Vanders]

I share your scepticism. Given the vast numbers of CVS repositories that exist and the ease with which you can transition to Subversion, I don't think it's popularity is going to wane any time soon. It also has some of the widest range of plugins for IDEs such as Visual Studio and Eclipse and the largest number of tools and clients, which make it a popular choice for a lot of new projects. Outside of Linux development Git is almost unheard of, but may gain popularity and although I've worked with Mercurial professionally I've yet to see it used anywhere for Open Source development, yet.

Re:No they don't.

[russotto]

Git is better at everything else, ever. Seriously -- 99% of projects that are hosted on SVN would make more sense on Git.

When I first looked at git, it wasn't even clear how simple revision control tasks could be done, e.g. simply checking in a file, or reverting changes to it. Looked like you had to deal with bizarre syntax and long hex numbers for the simplest things (and it's not just because it's distributed, as mercurial was much more straightforward). I assume that's changed as people aside from Linus actually use the thing, but it was very off-putting in the beginning.