Thu, 04 Feb 2010

Another Look at Version Control Systems

I’ve been using version control systems for ever—well, back to the days of SCCS anyway. Every few years, I survey the scene to see if there’s something that better fits my current needs. That way I came to use RCS instead of SCCS. Then I found CVS and, after some hesitation, migrated all my RCS repos to CVS. And then I found I hated some of the weaknesses of CVS and migrated back to RCS.

There things stayed until Subversion was ready for real world use. I chose not to migrate old work, but just started using svn for new projects and then for new work on old RCS-managed projects. That went pretty well and served me for some years.

But, as Subversion was hitting its stride, other people were working on distributed revision control systems and I started watching those projects. From time to time, I would spend a few days having a good look at the obvious contenders. A couple of years ago I felt there were a few that were ready to be considered: Git, Mercurial, Darcs, Bazaar all seemed interesting. After some consideration, I chose Mercurial and I have been happy with it.

But Bazaar, or bzr as it’s called on the command line, had been a close second in my assessment. Bzr was let down by some performance issues and also appeared to have a few other minor concerns.

Recently, I’ve had another look at the various DVCSes as part of another project and I think there’s very little to choose between Git, Mercurial and Bazaar. It comes down to comfort with the command structure and support for the workflows that you might want to adopt. For me, Git is still too clunky to use—it takes more typing to get the same result. But I think Bazaar has just moved ahead of Mercurial in terms of workflow options and it seems to have caught up in the performance area.

So I’m going to use Bazaar for a couple of new projects and I’m also going to convert a couple of active Mercurial projects over to Bazaar. And, in a few months, I’ll have an opinion about the wisdom of that choice and I’ll write about that in due course. I know I haven’t exactly explained my choice, but that’s deliberate because it really is a fine distinction and I’m pretty certain that Git, Mercurial and Bazaar are all fine systems.

Posted at: 18:10

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