2005-07-12 01:37:15 UTC
First, I agree that version control systems are great tools. Even if you just work by yourself, they do some very useful things. I used CVS at work for almost five years. It had its issues, but generally served us well. Recently, my company moved us to ClearCase, which was definitely *not* a step in the right direction. I've never heard of DARCS. I've heard good things about Subversion - if we hadn't had ClearCase forced upon us, we would probably have eventually moved to that.
On the other hand, a single developer working alone can get by with something a lot more light weight than any of those. For example, some IDEs have built in local version control systems. (IDEA does, and I think Eclipse does also.) For one person, those work quite nicely.
The main thing you get beyond that in something like CVS or Subversion is the collaboration tools. You can have lots of developers all checking in code together, possibly working in different branches, etc., and it helps you stay sane through all of that. But to be honest, I don't have much interest in that for AoI. If I were to set up a public CVS repository, I wouldn't give anyone but myself commit access. When someone sends me some code they've written, I first make my own decision about whether the feature they've implemented is a good idea. Then I go through their code carefully, and often end up rewriting parts of it.
Sorry, this isn't a democracy. :) But that's how almost all open source projects work (or at least the successful ones). You need central control, or you get chaos. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Nik to give me commit access for the source code to the vector renderer. That's his project, and while I might offer suggestions or even source code, he's free to accept or reject them as he chooses.
That's not to say that a public version control system wouldn't still be useful for some things. For example, it would give people an easy way to see exactly what files had changed in a particular release. But it's not that high a priority, and given the hassles it forces you to deal with (or at least, all the ones I've worked with do), I'm not in that much of a hurry to start using one.
Peter
