Re: [Rails-devel] Idea: migrating away from cvs.

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 5:02 PM, brett lentz <wak...@gm...> wrote:

> I've personally got experience with CVS, Subversion, and Git. I've
> only used Mercurial once or twice, which isn't enough to really have
> an opinion of it.
>
> Overall, my experience is that Git is light years ahead of CVS and
> Subversion.
>

I would agree CVS is ancient and to be avoided in anything but personal
projects.

Between git and svn, I would say it depends on what you are doing.  I am a
long time Unix user, and to me git feels like the Unix command line
philosophy -- lots of small tools that you piece together to get what you
want.  That is good in some ways in that you gain a lot of flexibility in
how you put the pieces together, but it is bad in that it feels lower level
and you have to do more steps for common tasks.  The other big difference is
it is more of a distributed model, where individual people can have their
own repositories and commit to them, which is good when they aren't
contributors in the main project.  I don't know about Sourceforge's svn
controls, but at least on code.google.com you can't have people with commit
access to subtrees of the repository, which is how svn users accomplish
similar tasks by having their own change branches for large changes.  That
means you have to give them commit access anyway and trust that they won't
commit elsewhere without proper review, but you can always rollback any
changes that shouldn't have been made and revoke commit access if they do.


> What are everyone else's thoughts and experiences?
> Is this something worth doing?
> Do you want to stay with CVS?
> Do you hate me because you're a new committer and you just got your
> environment set up, and now I'm proposing changing it?  ;-)
>

I think either svn or git would be fine and both have good Eclipse plugins.
 I haven't used Hg, so I don't know if it would be better or worse.  The
last time I used Bazaar it was buggy, which is far from what you want in
your version control system.  I personally use svn for most everything, but
if you don't have commit access for change branches it can be a pain to work
on large changes that you want to checkpoint status on before it is ready to
send for review.

-- 
John A. Tamplin