2006: the year of the SCM? [LWN.net]

2006: the year of the SCM?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 2:23 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: A 2006 retrospective

Something that I didn't forsee is the sheer explosion of source code management packages. It's been building for the past two or three years but this year many of them became quite mature and usable.

- git has become really good. Really good. I use it for most of my personal stuff now. Developers have generally quit adding features and are now trying to clean up what's there to make it more friendly for new users.
- bzr is now what gnu-arch should have been all along and still in strong development.
- hg is now fairly strong and development continues apace.
- svn has peaked and appears to be losing mindshare. (it's not losing seats, of course -- popularity is surging. it's definitely starting to look rusty around the edges though).
- svk continues to be a very useful addition to svn. Like svn, development pace has slowed a bit.

Alas, I haven't tracked darcs, monotone or codeville.

Think back to 2 years ago, then look at the tools we have today. It's a good time to be a programmer!

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2006: the year of the SCM?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 3:53 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

I've been using Darcs for some time now, and it seems quite healthy, featureful, and stable. While it is not as blazingly fast as git by any means, I find the interface of darcs much cleaner, more unified, and more friendly. I tried git for a while this summer and eventually went back to darcs; I'll try it again in a year, perhaps, and hopefully it will have improved.

SVN is losing?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 12:24 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

How do you figure that SVN is losing mindshare?

As far as I can tell it's on it's way up.

SVN is losing?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 16:55 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

To my mind SVN is gaining users. Afterall nowadays if you want a CVS like source control system thats not CVS you install SVN. It's supported and people understand it.

However I think the mindshare the parent is refering to is what people want out of their version control software. Not supprisingly with this flurry of development around the likes of git and co people are starting to think about what VC software can achieve. From my perspective SVN doesn't bring anything to the table other than being less broken than CVS for changesets.

SVN is losing?

Posted Dec 22, 2006 18:45 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

I think what he might be referring to is the slowdown in feature/concept development that svn is seeing. i.e. svn is now reaching the point where it is solid and most of the bold new features are complete. SVN does what it was designed to do. Many of the other projects are probably in heavy development with exciting new features being added all the time. While exciting indeed, it is not necessary what one wants when choosing a VCS system for production.

SVN on the other hand has become a very trusted replacement for CVS, to the point where I believe that it is much more solid than CVS ever was. I just spent my snowday yesterday successfully repairing my svn repository which had one corrupted file in it (corrupted I presume by my hard drive, not SVN.) The amazing part was that I was able to detect it in the first place and fix it with the incredibly nifty svnadmin tool (and some medium weight khexedit work)!

This ability of svn to have detected the corruption in the first place by noticing a checksum error on the data of a versioned file along with the svnadmin dump and load features which allowed me to recreate every transaction in a new repository, gave me more confidence than before this incident happened, that SVN is the right place to store my data as a backup. After all, normal backup methods (non VCS methods) would probably never have caught this error or allowed me to fix it unless I had very old backup data lying around. Since I don't know when this file got mangled, I could have just gone on backing up slightly corrupted data without ever knowing it.

I, for one, am very happy that this is the kind of development happening on svn, the development of very useful admin tools, along with the addition of other minor boring features that help polish svn and signal the entrance of svn into the mature product phase.

2006: the year of the SCM?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 17:09 UTC (Thu) by wsgibson (subscriber, #7336) [Link]

I agree. I had been using Subversion exclusively but have recently
introduced Bazaar into the mix. I have dabbled with git and do enjoy its
robustness and speed but Bazaar has been extremely intuitive and easy to
use for me. Its features match my needs plus it works on multiple
platforms which comes in handy for me.

2006: the year of the SCM?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 18:27 UTC (Thu) by shredwheat (subscriber, #4188) [Link]

Anyone remember BitKeeper?

Memory jolt!

Posted Dec 21, 2006 22:12 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

How time flies! I suppose I could go to the bitkeeper site and get a biased view, but I'd rather not pollute my brain. I wonder how they are doing, and how Larry is doing?

And for that matter, if anyone out there can compare the current bitkeeper with git, that would be fascinating. Larry has been so arrogant about how hard it would be to duplicate bitkeeper's functionality, I'd like to see the reality of that.