Version Control Systems

These are initial materials being collected for an overview of modern Version Control Systems.

Some common CVS problems

• No atomic commits or retrievals (my note – makes tracking history of changes a pain)
• Does not support renames (my note – its so last century!)
• Inefficient with binaries
• Interacts badly with backup software (my note – haven't noticed in what aspect its bad)
• Tends to leave stale locks (my note – haven't hit one in several years)
• Development has stagnated (my note – some kind of “we've reached everything we needed” thing)

Offers

fillme (features, pros, cons)

• monotone
• darcs (unsafe b/c of patch commuting impl, see here) (its also a bitch to build from sources if needed)
• svn, svk quite solid cvs follower, svk adds distributed and offline capabilites
• codeville
• bazaar-ng
• cogito, git
• Mercurial aka Hg git offshoot
• FastCST a ruby scm (quite experimental by nature)

Out of the picture

• tla – sucks (mostly from its inconsistent and hard to learn ui)
• bazaar – a clone of tla, aimed at easing the ui

Additional materials

quick comparison chart
ArX presentation at codecon
some cvs scripts might be helpful
some more scientific notes