Distributed Version Control
Jeffrey Shell writes about moving to distributed version control:
The more I play with the new breed of VCS tools, the more I appreciate them. The older generations (CVS, SVN) look increasingly archaic, supporting a computing and development model that seems unsustainable. Yet most of us lived with those tools, or something similar, for most of our development-focused lives.
When I speak of the new breed, the two standouts (to me) are Git and Mercurial. There are some other interesting ones, particularly Darcs, but Git and Mercurial seem to have the most steam and seem fairly grounded and stable. Between those two, I still find myself preferring Git. I’ve had some nasty webs to untangle and Git has provided me with the best resources to untangle them.
While Jeffrey is using Git, I’m using Mercurial, and I have to agree with him. I see two distinct advantages to distributed VCS:
- Ability to work totally disconnected
- Light-weight branching, etc.
Jeffrey talks a lot about the light-weight nature of things. I can’t even begin to explain how critical the ability work totally disconnected is to how I operate. I spend a lot of time on airplanes—measured in hours-per-week—and the inability to check-in, merge, diff, etc., is a huge impediment to getting work done. Right now, I’m struggling with getting Mercurial to work properly under Windows with SSH as the transport protocol, but I’ve managed to work around it for now.
If you’re doing a lot of work, even if it’s just a single developer, you should definitely be checking it out.
This entry was posted at 1:56 pm on 3 December 2007 and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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