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An Illustrated Version Control Timeline
rocket22 writes "Most software developers are supposed to be using the latest in tech and see themselves as living on the edge of software innovation. But, are they aware of how old some of the tools they use on a daily basis are? There are teams out there developing iPad software and checking in code inside arcane CVS repositories. Aren't we in the 21st century, the age of distributed version control? The blog post goes through some of the most important version control systems on the last three decades and while it doesn't try to come up with an extremely detailed thesis, it does a good job creating a catalog of some of the most widely spread or technologically relevant SCMs."
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It's possible I'm missing some shortcut syntax or something, but just the Subversion syntax for creating a branch and merging is just terrible. Compare git checkout -b my-new-branch to either remembering the whole repository URL or running svn info and copying and pasting it, then running svn copy some://really.long/url/to/your/repository/trunk some://really.long/url/to/your/repository/branches/my-new-branch then svn switch some://really.long/url/to/your/repository/branches/my-new-branch. And merging is similar.
You can avoid this syntax by checking out the whole damn repository and using working-copy paths, but this has its own set of severe drawbacks (e.g. now your svn copy takes a long time).
These drawbacks are made smaller by Tortoise (which is awesome) since you can just edit the existing URL in the switch dialog, but it's still pretty darn ugly.
I like Subversion, probably just because I know it, and use it for my home projects, but if there was an actual benefit ... I'd love to switch to something better
I'd really encourage you to give Git a shot. Pick a project and use it for that project. It takes some getting used to, but it's not too bad, and once you are used to it it provides a number of really nice benefits even if you're just a single person working on your own projects. And there is a TortoiseGit that works well. (Just be aware that TortoiseGit attempts to hide what Git calls the index. This makes it act more like TortoiseSvn from your standpoint, but I did run into a problem once that was caused by mixing use of TortoiseGit and the command line git client in one repository.)
(From my own standpoint, I've heavily used all of CVS, Svn, and Git. I hate CVS with a passion, and for a long time thought that the improvements you get from moving from CVS to Svn were enormous in comparison to moving from Svn to Git. I still think this is true, but as I've used Git more and more, I think the Svn to Git change brought about rather more benefits than I initially considered even for single-person and centralized projects.)