The question is in the subject line.
Which, and why?
Question: Bazaar, Mercurial, CVS or Subversion?
Comments
5 responses to “Question: Bazaar, Mercurial, CVS or Subversion?”
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I don’t know about Bazaar and only read about Mecurial. But I would take CVS out of the list on the grounds that SVN or Mecurial both supersede it (and can import cvs). So surely it is just a choice of which features you want. As I understand it Mecurial is much better a merging (though svn 1.5 is much better that 1.4)
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I guess the main question would be, do you want a traditional centralised VCS or a distributed one with multiple trees, cloning, etc ?
There’s also Git, DARCS, Arch and Monotone on the DVCS side, but the two with most traction at the moment are reallly Git and Mercurial.
This might help too:
http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2007/12/10/how-i-stopped-missing-darcs-and-started-loving-git
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What? No SCCS? 🙂
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Funny; SCCS is something I know how to drive… but nobody else does, nowadays…
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I find Mercurial easy to use. There’s a day or two to learn to think in the distributed manner. Setting up repositories is easy and fast, so you can experiment without a big time commitment. Start by focusing on the basic hg commands init, clone, status, commit, push and pull.
I chose Mercurial because of its high performance. For a fairly large repository Mercurial was much faster than Subversion. Mercurial’s merge support was better than Subversion’s. An advantage over git is that Mercurial has better windows support. Also Mercurial’s interface seems cleanly designed. Mercurial gives me the freedom to move my work around, or merge with other’s work, without a lot of hassles.
I highly recommend setting up the Mercurial hgk extension to view the repository and installing kdiff3 for a graphical merge tool.
Bazaar is an interesting choice too. They have recently made some speed improvements, so they might be a valid candidate.
Subversion is widely used, but I think the basic design was not so good. I think they’ve been struggling with some issues which were solved easily in Mercurial.
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