Comments on: Thoughts on source control systems

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:58:00 +0000

ASpanishGuy & Jakub: ah, thanks for the mingw update, didn’t know about that. As I say, give it a few years and the landscape for DVCS will be much richer I’m sure, it’s all a bit hardcore for most developers right now and only those with a specific need (ie particularly large open source projects) or interest will venture there I think. I’m certainly interested enough in it to educate myself on how it works, but I don’t feel confident enough to use it in my mainstream projects yet. Like for many people it took Subversion many years to earn my trust and get to the stage where good tool integration was ubiquitous, it would be unrealistic to expect anything different from the DVCS’s, but I’m sure it will happen.

@SunSailor: I’m pretty sure this point (visibility of tags/branches from the originating branch) has been made already, at least I’d be amazed if it hasn’t. I know for a fact that a ton of people have (rightly so) lambasted the ability to commit to tags, people have come up with hooks to prevent it but it’s a nasty hack.

By: Paul Evans

Paul Evans — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:35:26 +0000

I’d not come across Perforce until I started work at my current position, and I’m getting to appreciate what it does now over other systems. Still use subversion for my own personal projects though, I keep a little repro on my usb drive on my keychain

By: SunSailor

SunSailor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:38:41 +0000

Good point about the tags and branches in subversion, always felt that they have overseen something with their approach… Have you ever posted this special criticism to the developer list?

By: Frenetic

Frenetic — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:52:38 +0000

Yay! Thank you, Steve.

By: Jakub Narebski

Jakub Narebski — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:28:24 +0000

You can use Git without Cygwin, using MinGW/MSys port called msysGit.

There are a few GUI, both history viewers (gitk is distriuted with git, in Tcl/Tk) and commit tools (git-gui is distributed with git, in Tcl/Tk). There exist ongoing egit/jgit project which aims to add Git support to Eclipse; current GSoC projects includes adding Git support to KDevelop (KDE’s project) and to Anjuta IDE (GNOME’s project).

There is GitCheetah which aims to be equivalent of TortoiseSVN / TortoiseCVS, but I think it is in beginning stages.

It will be some time till Git gets mature tools support on the rate of Subversion’s, especially on Windows which is not its primary platform. On the other hand its design is solid, contrary to abuse of ‘copy’ in Subversion.

By: ASpanishGuy

ASpanishGuy — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:12:57 +0000

ohhh, i remenber the old days when i was using RCS…How things have changed!!!

You are right(and very well informed about VCS, you named the most important) about the next logical step: DVCS, and i hope that TortoiseGit takes over the world. You can now install git without cygwin(there’s a mingw32 version around there), but ti’s TCL/TK gui sucks very much. After reading some articles and playing with git. I can agree with 2 facts:
-It’s the best VCS in the world
-Some crazy guy will use git as a filesystem in his linux distro .

PS: svn-git works right, it will make the transition smoothly.