Hi, Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread; it’s been hella revealing and illuminating to read all the reasoning and technical considerations that have driven the design choices and tool selections that have gone into the OpenBSD Project, especially for someone new to the Project such as myself who hasn’t had the benefit of experiencing the quarter century of context and the biases that come with that.
In university courses we’ve been using Git primarily, but I cannot emphasize enough that I am not a big fan of Git; I find it overly complicated, and it would not be a good fit for the OpenBSD Project for myriad reasons. However, the more I use Mercurial, the more I love it. I think there are distinct advantages to a distributed source code management system (I prefer the term ‘source code management’ because to me terms such as ‘software configuration management’ sound not only pretentious but utterly devoid of meaning) over a centralized SCM system such as CVS or Subversion. This article, albeit old and outdated, does a good job summarizing how I feel about Mercurial vs. Git: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-mercurial/ However, as much as I personally love Mercurial (and I really think OpenBSD developers would honestly like it too for its simplicity compared to systems like Git), everyone’s thoughtful responses have helped me to appreciate the complexity of considerations (licensing, additional dependencies that would be required in base, etc.) involved. With regard to Subversion vs. CVS, I heard that Subversion was once marketed as something like “CVS done right,” but to me personally I don’t feel there is any way that CVS can be “done right,” so to me Subversion does not represent all that much of an improvement over CVS. In the end I believe the best tools for the job that both have acceptable licenses and have the biggest buy-in among all OpenBSD developers should be the ones used, and to the extent that design decisions continue to be made solely based on technical considerations and not on dogma or ideology, the OpenBSD developer community will continue to make the right decisions for the Project. Thanks for all the insightful and enlightening feedback! Austin “If you want to change the future, start living as if you’re already there.” —Lynn Conway “If you want to change the future, start living as if you’re already there.” —Lynn Conway
