[OT] Q: what would you choose for a VCS today

[Mike Meyer]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:45:55 +0200 "Adrian Penisoara" <ady at freebsd.ady.ro> wrote:
>   Side-topic, if you bear with me: if you were to choose again what to use
> as source revision control system (VCS) from today's offerings, what would
> you choose to maintain FreeBSD's sources or a side-off project tracking
> FreeBSD as base that would allow better teams cooperation and easy code
> merging between projects/branches ?

Pretty much any post-CVS VCS will do that. But if you want a good
merge facility, Perforce's are - well, after getting used to them,
everything else feels like throwing your code against the wall and
hoping the right parts stick. I talked to one of the git developers
about a year ago, and they were thinking about adding a guided merge
inspired by what Perforce does.

>   For the moment I am thinking that the top contenders would be Bazaar and
> Mercurial but I would like to know other (developer) opinions.

I last looked at distributed VCS systems about a year ago, and at the
time liked Mercurial. The technology seems like it would be great for
a project like FreeBSD. However, best practices for using them were
still being worked out, and I'm not sure I'd want to commit a
long-term project to one under those conditions.

For a centralized VCS systems I've checked, perforce is the best of
the post-CVS systems (and the only one that doesn't leave turds in the
build tree). Subversion is a close second, but is still a little rough
around the edges. Most notably, merge tracking is in the 1.5 beta
builds, but not in the production code.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.