On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 02:51:31PM -0600, Tyler Benson wrote: > I'm kinda confused. I always thought the big fishes of version control were > CVS and SVN. How do these other ones (Darcs/git) compare? Are they totally > different tools?
I kind of enjoyed Linus Torvalds' presentation at Google where he discussed why he wrote Git. The talk is really more about distributed version control in general than it is about Git itself. Anyway, that's at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 The main distributed revision control systems that I think are worth looking at are Git, Mercurial, Darcs, and Bazaar. They each have different strengths and weaknesses, and I'm partial to Git, but they all have some huge advantages over centralized revision control systems. In a distributed revision control system, you can make commits even if you don't have write access to a centralized repository. This means that you can make commits even if you are offline (like on an airplane or a bus). It also means that it is much easier for people to participate in a project before they are a trusted member of the project. I don't know about Darcs, but Git and Mercurial allow you to do very fast branching. This makes it much easier to experiment with code, to work on multiple features simultaneously, and to make frequent commits. Branching is technically possible with CVS and SVN, but it is so inconvenient that you don't get the benefit of it. I'm still using SVN at work, and now that I'm familiar with Git, I'm constantly wanting to make branches but don't because it's too inconvenient. Anyway, for any open source project, distributed revision control makes a huge difference by making it easier for others to participate. Even in private and closed-source projects, it's still nice to use distributed revision control because of branching. -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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