Martin Pool's blog

Liberal Media Bias

John Sequeira says that I write a lot about version control (which is true) and that I have a bias towards distributed version control, which is also true.

  1. Distributed development is the whole point of open source. People should be able to contribute without needing prior permission; and to work with you even if they're on another continent.
  2. I live in Australia, also known as the arse end of the earth. Roundtrips to the US are slow. I don't want to spend any more time waiting for CVS to open an SSH tunnel if I can possibly avoid it.
  3. Version control, properly conceived, ought to offer distribution at no added cost. Andrew Morton's quilt does it in a couple of hundred lines of shell. Given you can have it for free, why not? It might be useful. The challenge is to make it sufficiently simple and reliable, but I think some new systems come close.
  4. Cheap branches can be useful; distributed systems where they need never leave your workstation are a good way to get it.

I really should try Monotone (again) and Svk.

To be fair, here's what I like about Subversion:

  1. It is extremely easy to learn if you're used to CVS. If you work with people who see VC as a cost, rather than a benefit, then it may be the easiest switch.
  2. It fixes the most annoying parts of CVS: you can rename files, version tags, etc.
  3. There is a good book, a selection of GUIs, and it runs on many platforms.

On the downside, it is a bit prone to crashing and you get something only incrementally better than CVS.

posted Tue 24 Aug 2004 in /software/vc/subversion | link

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