[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: Advocating periodic releases

[Aurelien Jacobs]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006 17:22:07 +0200
Panagiotis Issaris <takis.issaris at uhasselt.be> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 06:14:11PM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 16:19 +0200, Panagiotis Issaris wrote:
> > > Slightly off topic, but I really can't resist... mentioning that GIT might
> > > be just that advanced version control system you are looking for :) Well,
> > > seriously, I think it has a _lot_ of advantages to traditional version control
> > > systems such as CVS or SVN. To convince some colleagues, I posted something on
> > > my blog [1] regarding GIT.
> > 
> > While I don't really disagree, I think the way you phrase this is
> > somewhat misleading. Distributed systems do have several advantages over
> > "traditional" ones, but you make it sound as if those advantages were
> > unique to GIT. The main reasons to stay with CVS and SVN are inertia and
> > their known stability; once you decide to move to something newer the
> > main competitors of GIT are other distributed systems.
> True. I should have mentioned other systems, such as Bitkeeper, Bazaar, TLA,
> Svk, darcs, ...

 - Bitkeeper is closed-source
 - Bazaar and TLA are dead
 - Svk don't seem very good (at least not very popular)
 - darcs is quite slow

But you didn't mentionned the real GIT competitors, which are Bazaar-NG
and Mercurial. Bazaar-NG seems to not be as mature and quite slower.
But Mercurial has a very similar feature set. It is often slightly faster
than GIT and slightly more storgage efficient. The biggest advantage
of Mercurial over GIT is IMO it's better and simpler user interface.
For example, I don't want to mess with the repository internal. Why does
git-repack exist ? It should just work without letting me know.

> But, some of them have not been used intensively enough for my liking. The only
> two of them that have effectively been used on large projects AFAIK are
> Bitkeeper and GIT. As Bitkeeper is closed-source and commercial software, the
> choice was rather easy for me :)

Probably because you didn't know about Mercurial ;-)
It is used by some important projects such as Xen, alsa, v4l... It has
been choosed by open solaris and is currently evaluated (with success)
to handle the full tree of FreeBSD ports (much bigger than linux or
other such projects).

Anyway, GIT and Mercurial are both very good, and when you are accustomed
to them, you can't appreciate SVN anymore.

Aurel