keeping track of local modifications

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:

> ... most of us are volunteers who enjoy using and working on
> FreeBSD in our (often quite limited) spare time ...  If I only
> have a couple of hours a week, I'd usually rather spend it coding
> ...

Sounds familiar :)

Getting back to the OP's original question, and in light of the
limited time that many of us have available, I was wondering which of
the readily-available VCS would impose the least overhead on someone
who has very little experience with any open source VCS (and thus is
going to have to learn *something* new).  After looking at the pages
recommended by others in this thread, I wonder if there are other
possibilities which one should consider.

* http://wiki.freebsd.org/SubversionPrimer

  I got the impression that SVN is quite resource-hungry, both in
  disk space and in bandwidth, and has an extremely steep learning
  curve.  While a committer clearly has to deal with SVN, I was left
  wondering if it really had much to offer the more casual hacker,
  esp. one who is not already familiar with it.  In particular, given
  that one will likely have already installed /usr/src/... from the
  distribution, I was put off by the apparent need to download
  another entire instance.

* http://wiki.freebsd.org/LocalMercurial

  This seems less of a resource hog, and (if I am understanding
  matters correctly) is able to start from the installed /usr/src/...
  rather than requiring the would-be hacker to download a redundant
  instance, but I was concerned that the page may not be up to date
  with current FreeBSD development methodology (e.g. csup vs cvsup).

In case it makes any difference, I've used SCCS and RCS a little (but
neither all that recently), and have been using ClearCase a great
deal for the last several years (but it is not a candidate for this
inquiry since I'm not licensed to use it outside the office).