(no subject)

[nolly]

Speak to me of version control systems.

I'm particularly interested in Mercurial vs. Subversion (and/or svk), but if you have another favorite, tell me about it. Open source products only, please.

Comments

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

I use Eclipse as my IDE, and connect it to CVS. It's not a plug-n-play arrangement, though. I still think I don't know enough of how CVS works to be using it properly, even through the filter of an IDE.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I use Eclipse and Subversion (using the Subversive SVN plug-in to Eclipse). I've been quite happy with Subversion. I've used CVS a lot in the past, and the concepts translate easily.

[jeran.livejournal.com]

My take has usually been CVS for small-scale stuff, subversion as things get larger. They're both well-known and well-supported (subversion is pretty much CLI-client-compatible with CVS).

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

My company just switched (maybe a year ago) from cvs to subversion (we got to the "larger" point jeran mentions, and cvs just wasn't cutting it anymore) and subversion seems like it's working well and the grumpy admin doesn't seem to have any complaints with it, which is rare for him. But I don't have any personal knowledge of it.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Uh, by "personal" I mean "personal administration." Of course I use the darn thing every day.

[brooksmoses]

I use subversion for both corporate and personal stuff.

The TortoiseSVN integration between subversion and the Windows Explorer file lists is exceptionally nifty and useful. Any time you look at a file in an explorer window (and, thanks to Windows integration foo, this goes for "open" dialog boxes and stuff too), the icon shows its version-control status. The usual right-click menu has extra stuff like "commit" and "update" and "diff", and so forth. It is indescribably handy to have the ability to glance at a directory and see whether everything in it has been committed or not -- and, if not, to scan the file listing that I'm already looking at and see what's uncommitted.

(But that's a Windows-only thing. I'm not sure whether they have other OS versions of TortoiseSVN, or whether that's relevant to you.)

It was also quite simple to set up an SVN repository, back when I did that for my personal stuff. TortoiseSVN even has a wizard for setting one up in one's local filesystem, but on command-line it's pretty simple too, and the standalone server wasn't much harder. I don't know about the Apache plugin, not being familiar enough with Apache to do much with it.

We do use SVK for a lot of things at work; I get the impression that it does offer some things that subversion otherwise doesn't, but it is also occasionally flaky and misses things. I haven't done enough with it to have a direct impression of what it offers that subversion doesn't.

My understanding of the benefits of the more-recent version control systems such as Mercurial is that their primary benefit is in having distributed repositories, which are handy for carrying things around with you and/or for having version control on something that's too preliminary to go into the main repository, or suchlike. Having not used them, I can't really say much about the usefulness of that in practice. I suspect that it's much more relevant to large development teams, and would be essentially irrelevant for repositories for a single person. (Also, I don't actually know how much of this applies to Mercurial. I gather from my colleagues that there have been interminable "discussions" about such things on the GCC mailing list recently, and I have thankfully avoided them.)

[moonchsr.livejournal.com]

I've only used Subversion with Eclipse.. also have Tortise installed. Both work great! I don't have any experience admin'ing it, but as a user - I'm happy with it.

Although, if you fubar a file up outside of subversion.. kinda a pain to get it all back to the way it was, before it was touched.