A comment on version control systems, especially git ...

Most version control systems are descendants of the ancient RCS. CVS, SVN,
Mercurial, and on and on are all pretty much attempts to make RCS function
in a collaborative environment.

A few years ago, Linus saw some issues with these old control systems,
especially speed, and decided to do a new, from-scratch VCS which he
called git.  Today, most new projects in the FOSS world use git and many
existing projects have converted or are converting.  The Linux kernel
project, of course, was the first.

Four or five years ago virtually every open source project used CVS or
SVN, mostly SVN.  Now practically everyone uses git.

git is way faster than those older systems, although unless your project
is absolutely huge you can't see the difference.  But if your project IS
huge, the difference is dramatic, roughly an order of magnitude speed
difference for very large operations.

But it doesn't come free.  If you are used to one of the older systems it
can be really hard to get your head around git.

In most of the older systems the repository consists of the files with
patch instructions to get to the earlier versions, so even if you didn't
have the software it is possible, if tedious, to recover your files.  In
git, everything is a hash so the files in the repository make no sense at
all.

In most of the older systems, versions get named something sensible by
default, like 1.1, 1.1.2, etc.  In git everything, and I mean everything,
is named with a SHA1 hash.

But the reality is you almost never need to refer to something by a
version number unless it is one you assigned anyway (which you can do with
any of the systems), and mostly you either do default commits or use the
GUI, so this isn't as big a deal as it sounds.

If you are an SVN or CVS user, it is really really hard to get the hang of
git.  But once you do, going back to SVN is like having your fingernails
pulled out.

All of the big hitters, CVS, SVN, RCS, git, integrate with pretty much
every IDE, except, of course, Microsoft who integrates with SourceSafe.=20
SVN, git and I assume CVS, but probably RCS, all have web interfaces as
well which can be darned handy for browsing a large number of
repositories.

If you still have an MS-DOS box you are probably stuck with RCS.

--McD


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