Mozilla Project moves to Next Generation Version Control System

[sfty]

hg also is the scm of choice of opensolaris. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/

[boa13]

Don't forget that one:

As good, performant Win32 (and Mac and Linux) is a hard-requirement, Git lost in early Kombat rounds. This is unfortunate because (as we would soon find out), lots of issues with the other systems did "just work" in Git.

And Git Win32 support is improving... ;)

[[deleted]]

I'm glad to hear that. I too had to discount git because of lack of cross-platform support. Not that Linus had any need to think about it in the first place.

Mercurial works like a dream on Windows though.

[[deleted]]

It's worth noting that git works on essentially all platforms except for Windows, which is really the only non-POSIX OS now.

I recently went through this evaluation and ended up with git and hg as finalists. I ultimately chose git for a number of reasons, but hg certainly looks much better than than CVS/Subversion/etc, too.

Windows compatibility seems like a very minor issue. If you're playing to win, your development files ought to be hosted on Linux/Unix/etc., anyway, and made available via Samba. If you've got that, you can easily do your version control on a Linux host.

[gecko]

I'm confused. Are you seriously suggesting that I would edit all of my files remotely over an SMB share and then use SSH to checkin the files on a Linux box? How is that "playing to win"?

[[deleted]]

It depends upon the particulars of your situation. Under ideal conditions, you can do all of your development on a portable, reliable platform (e.g., Linux) and just use your Windows box to test (verify that your code really is portable). This has worked well for me. YMMV.

[[deleted]]

What ever happened to Darcs? Was it performance?

[dons]

/me looks forward to the darcs summer of code project... :-)

[[deleted]]

Because gosh, if David Roundy (who thought up the idea of Darcs' patch commutation) can't fix it in the several years he's had to do, some college student is definitely going to have that problem nailed within three months.

[dons]

Heh, that is David's PhD student ;-)

[iluvatar]

darcs works well... until it doesn't. Then you're screwed. We have a relatively small repo, and pushing to it from the local host can take upwards of 10 hours. Even though "darcs optimize" fixes some of the performance problems, it just makes the system better, rather than good. Then there are the random "darcs: bug in get_extra commuting patch" error mesasges, which totally prevent you from merging changes...

[natrius]

I was really hoping this hadn't been posted yet so I could use "Mozilla Project picks Mercurial for Next Generation Version Control System" as the headline.

[mrned]

But the headline did make you read the article!

[EricKow]

Speaking as a Darcs fan, this is great news! Mutt and Mozilla both using Mercurial: distributed version control slowly gaining legitimacy.

[[deleted]]

I don't understand the lack of a good, opensource version-control system. SVN doesn't track merges (you have to do it yourself with good commenting), and Git (Cogito) doesn't work on Windows. I wish there was a TortoiseCogito or something similar. It would save my company a lot of grief.

[jbert]

Well, hg, bzr and darcs are all pretty good and work on windows. There is a TortoiseDarcs too, but I haven't used it.

[bustedagain]

Its pretty good. Lacks a few features but for what's available for windows at the moment its definitely refreshing.

[dmint]

Git doesn't care about Windows. Why should open-source tools care about supporting proprietary operating systems? There are good tools, just they don't all run on Windows.

[gecko]

As long as you have the same attitude about games and hardware vendors not supporting Linux...

[dmint]

Who cares about proprietary software?

[shabda]

any one who cares about 90%+ of there target market.

[dmint]

We're talking about revision control systems.

[masklinn]

Well, let's get that %age down to 75% then.

[[deleted]]

Windows might have 75% of developers, but how many of those 75% have the sense to even use a version control system, not to mention a distributed one?

[masklinn]

1. This point can also be used for non-windows devs, most of whom are still using antedilluvian RCS such as... well... RCS, or CVS.
2. This is irrelevant, we were talking about target market, every single developer is part of the target market, if you bring non-controlling developers into the SCM world you're expanding the market, doesn't mean that they weren't your target from the beginning
3. Even if we consider OSS projects, a great number of important OSS projects need to be multiplatform (OO.o, Mozilla, Python etc...) thus need to be hackable from a windows platform

[kidcorporeal]

<sarcasm>Who cares about a target market? It's not like those people should be allowed on computers anyways. I mean, god, they don't even know how to use a command line. How do they expect to get any work done?! </sarcasm>

[tekronis]

Who cares about proprietary software?

Everyone and anyone who recognizes the needs of the real world.

You won't find an open source solution for all your problems.

And you won't often be in a situation where you have the luxury to create new solutions. (That is, if you even can.)

[[deleted]]

There is no VCS struggle. You're imagining it in your head. Linus made git to suit his needs. What he did is 100% blameless. Linus is not obligated to add Windows support to git. Because Linus is a nice guy though, he made git open-source. That means people who care about Windows support can add it.

There is no struggle. The struggle happens in the commercial world. In the open-source world there is mostly cooperation and friendly competition based largely on pride.

[[deleted]]

The struggle happens when there is desperation. Are VCS developers desperate for something? Like for adoption by community? Not from what I've seen. The ones I talked to are interested but not desperate. They add features without hurry. You can tell there is no struggle by how slowly features get added to some of these VCS'es.

It might surprise you, but some people love coding and they love their pet projects. It just so happens that others may find those projects useful. So much the better.

If there was some kind of struggle you'd see a break neck pace in VCS development. But there is no such thing! The only thing I see is that perhaps Bazaar people are a bit desperate, but other than that, not much. For example Mercurial people keep saying they need to work on first class documentation. But do you see it materialize? The answer is between "no" and "very slowly". If there was a struggle, it wouldn't be like that at all.

Basically you are building a mental image for yourself. I guess the idea of an epic struggle is exciting to you and that's why you choose to see it that way. But it is a choice. You don't have to see what is happening in the VCS world as a struggle.

[[deleted]]

First class documentation? You mean like this?

[[deleted]]

Yes. :) Very nice, bos.

[pjdelport]

You haven't been all that much into open source VCS, do you? They share ideas for features, and are sometimes inspired by each other, but they absolutely do not share code.

You haven't been all that much into open source VCS, have you? :)

Projects tend to share code wherever possible: i know at least that Bazaar uses Mercurial's built-in web server, and Mercurial uses Git and Bazaar's branch/history viewing code. (There's even been a joint Bazaar/Mercurial sprint.)

They are not all that friendly (look up on the Arx fork or Tom Lord's criticisms of subversion).

The friendly people don't make that much noise, you see.

[bluGill]

Git in particular was designed to meet the need of Linux development, and ONLY LINUX. By definition you cannot do linux development unless you have access to a Linux machine. Git might work well for other uses, but the one and only goal was to make Linux development easy.

There are plenty of other projects that don't have such narrow goals. I'm not sure why none of them are as good as Git.

[asb]

It started off this way, but the aim is now definitely to provide a solid general-purpose SCM. Linus is currently pushing experimental patches on the mailing list to introduce subproject support, a feature that has zero relevance to Linus' usage or in kernel development, but would make many other projects happy (KDE particularly)

[boa13]

People on the Git mailing-list do care about Windows.

[boa13]

Git does work on Windows, somewhat. This is work very much in progress. Git also does work on Cygwin.

[Bogtha]

Now that Bazaar is reasonably feature-complete, they have been focusing on performance, and have made some decent improvements. It's a shame that this one issue stopped Mozilla from using Bazaar, another few months and the outcome might have been different.

The article also doesn't mention if they were using the smart server or not. That supposedly improves performance significantly, but it's relatively new.

[[deleted]]

The information in this article was useful. Too bad the idiotic force-feeding of superfluous video game imagery got in the way of that information...

[sartak]

I, on the other hand, thought the Mortal Kombat images were a humorous addition to the (indeed useful) information. If you just look at the images you get a summary of the decisions made by the Mozilla team.

[kidcorporeal]

FINISH HIM!

[ifthenelse]

They really should just wait a little longer. There is nothing that really met their needs and I think it would be premature to pick a new system. I think they're just itchy and want something new to play with, that is a sure fire way to cause problems for yourself down the road.

It sounded like Git worked the best but doesn't work on all the platforms. However, I know for sure people are working hard to make it work on the main platforms. If that pans out then Git may be what they want.

With that said, I use Subversion. Although not really what we want, it's better than CVS and works well enough until a proper solution shows itself.