OT: Source code control systems

[Bill Baxter]

Nicolas J. wrote:
> Leandro Lucarella Wrote:
> 
>> The problem with darcs it's it doesn't scale very well (because of
>> implementation issues, they say). I love darcs for small projects, but
>> (sadly) it's not really suitable for big ones yet.
>>
>> Another great (distributed) SCM is git, done by Linus Tolvards for
>> maintaing the Linux kernel (a really big project, as you know, so it
>> scales by design).
>>
>> -- 
> Yes. And in fact, browsing the darcs repository online (which I suppose is managed by darcs) is a pretty painful experience. http://abridgegame.org/cgi-bin/darcs.cgi/darcs/
> 
> git is hardly an option beacuse it is non-portable (it takes advantages of optimizations for the Libux kernel, from what I gather,  so it's not going to be ported soon), and it has some usability issues due to design choices of its author ("renaming files is not important"). I believe mercurial would be a much better option, as it is said to scale very well. And it also has the Clearcase-like merge with history.
> 
> Anyway, this is probably not the right moment to continue discussing things like this.

That was my impression about git too, but apparently current devs are 
more interested and open about win32 issues.  Also you can now get a 
precompiled git for windows via Cygwin whereas before the answer I got 
was something like "yeh, you should be able to compile it on Windows 
with cygwin, no prob".

The inkscape devs have pretty much decided to go with Git.  I cried 
"noooooo" like you, because my experience had been that Git was for 
Linux and Unix.  Period.  End of story.  But they say it's not so.  And 
Git is the only SCM to have Google SoC projects, so that seems like it 
says something about how much they've got their act together.  Plus it 
does have that whole Linux seal of approval, so it's not going away any 
time soon.

The UI issues I don't know much about, but I gather that's what 'cogito' 
is for -- to put a user-friendly svn-like face on git.

Now may not be the best time to discuss it for D, per-se, but I'm tired 
of not being able to do commits when I'm home or traveling, and I'm 
ready to switch to one of these fancy distributed thingamajigs.  I just 
can't tell which one because none of those projects will come right out 
and say honestly "<Project> -- We're not as good as <X>,<Y>, and <Z>, 
but we're usable!"

Like the darcs performance thing.  Never heard that before.  But that 
plus the idea being kooky to begin with (source code control based on 
"quantum theory" -- uh, yeh, whatever)  sound like good enough reasons 
to drop it off the list. :-)  Now what about the other two?  :-)  Gaim 
(now Pidgin) just announced a move to Monotone, and I assume someone 
looked carefully into that choice.

Here's something that would matter to me -- which one has the best tools 
for migrating from svn?  Anyone know?

--bb