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The GNOME DVCS survey
Elijah Newren has posted a
lengthy analysis of the recently-concluded developer survey on
distributed version control systems. "It looks like there's a strong
preference in the community toward switching, and that git has a strong
lead in preference among the community, followed by svn, then bzr, then
mercurial."
(Log in to post comments)
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 19:58 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
How strange that he didn't ask about Monotone.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:11 UTC (Mon) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] Monotone is used by very few projects these days. It had a pioneering design, but several implementation and interface problems that made it not very suitable for doing real work (the fact that Git is easier to use than Monotone, at least the last time I tried it, says a lot).Here is the currently listed set of steps for checking out the Monotone source code: $ mtn --db=mtn.db db init $ mtn --db=mtn.db pull monotone.ca "net.venge.monotone*" $ mtn --db=mtn.db checkout -r t:monotone-0.28 monotoneCompared to the steps for Git, Hg, and Bzr: $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git $ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo $ bzr branch http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev bzr.devAdd on the fact that the data format changes on each release and thus requires a migration, that it's fairly slow, and it just isn't really competitive with the other options these days.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:48 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] >Compared to the steps for GitWell, if you do it with git's plumbing, it is similarly hard:
It looks that mtn is still much of the plumbing tool that git once was, so at least give it some slack when doing comparisons
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:39 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
Unless monotone offers a simple command to do the equivalent of the three commands given, the criticism stands. It is also possible to expand the "bzr branch" command into multiple steps, but people would very rarely do that.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 8, 2009 10:23 UTC (Thu) by vivi48 (subscriber, #6412) [Link] it does ...mtn clone monotone.ca net.venge.monotone
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:59 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link]
Yes, but Monotone has been around for several years longer than Git. Git was in fact inspired by the
design of Monotone, but implemented to be much more efficient and to work better as a plumbing system that you could wrap porcelain around. Monotone is a big monolithic blob of C++, so it's fairly difficult to link to, and only around the time that Git was being developed did Monotone start addding a scripting interface with a standardized, parseable output format. And even still, there doesn't appear to be very good porcelain around it, while Git's design has meant that more porcelain has been written more quickly.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 6:18 UTC (Tue) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]
sorry, can't resist...
http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/ -- the last para but one is always worth a look :-)
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 0:11 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Elijah didn't ask about anything, this is an analysis of survey data that was released by the GNOME project.
My suspicion is that if GNOME is like most other large (and particularly Free Software) projects, it's already using Git. Developers who like Git will take arbitrary source code or other data and suck it into Git because it makes their life easier. So formally moving the project to Git would just mean putting the rubber stamp on the paperwork (and saving a lot of people huge swathes of disk space).
Of course moving the /whole project/ is a good deal (and probably months of work) different from a few individual developers choosing to use Git. But unlike with earlier non-distributed version control systems the DVCS revolution is itself distributed. If GNOME makes no decision the number of people using Git to contribute will climb anyway.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 12:29 UTC (Tue) by ajf (subscriber, #10844) [Link]
Sometimes Monotone's user base appears to consist primarily of people writing comparisons of DVCSs.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 21:13 UTC (Mon) by roskegg (subscriber, #105) [Link]
How about darcs? Clearly the most superior DVCS, yet people avoid it like the plague.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:48 UTC (Mon) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]
Since you're carelessly throwing around "clearly superior", I bet you have some really good facts to back that statement up? I'm definitely not an expert in the area, but I know that darcs has been infamous for performance issues, and looking at the wikipedia feature comparison of different VCS, darcs doesn't seem to have any feature that other systems doesn't have, while other popular systems, such as git, have features that darcs lack.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 0:29 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Such feature comparisons can be misleading (I'm not claiming one way or another for this Wikipedia entry, since I have deliberately not read it) because it's easy to dismiss a core feature of a product you don't like as "mere sugar" and not include it, while taking a fairly minor feature (or a very narrow definition of that feature) from another product you do like and add a whole column with a single check mark in it.
It's also possible to introduce misleading comparison results by doing an apples / oranges comparison where you compare your knowledge of one system with your ignorance of another, or you check features from a bullet point list for one system off against the rather disorganised documentation of the other, leading you to miss features.
The Shlomi Fish "Better SCM" site for example is very clear that Git won't do a merge across a rename. It even has a citation for this claim. But as a Git user who has actually done a merge across a rename I know it works just fine, and anyone familiar with Git's internals will guess immediately why. Yet probably there is no line of documentation on the Git site or elsewhere that I can quote to justify adding a "Yes" to the comparison.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:50 UTC (Tue) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]
Sure, I forgot to write a disclaimer about Wikipedia, and comparisons in general, but my point wasn't to claim that git (which I just picked as an example) is better than darcs, I just wanted to obviate that the post I was commenting on had a totally unsubstantiated claim.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 2:41 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
off topic, but I posted your comment to the git mailing list and the response I got (about 5 min later) was
quote:
"Additionally this can detect and handle merges involving renames."
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:51 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
From what I have heard about darcs, I would say it is its hydra commit management ( http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/hydra-vs-regular.png ) that would worry me most.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 23:20 UTC (Tue) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link]
>from what I have heard about darcs, I would say it is its hydra commit management ( http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/hydra-vs-regular.png ) that would worry me most.
See that hydra commit management looks better than the normal commit to me.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 0:18 UTC (Tue) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link] Even the Haskell developers have decided to stop using Darcs; here are their reasons why and evaluation of the alternatives.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 5:21 UTC (Tue) by leonov (subscriber, #6295) [Link]
I was a fan of Darcs for years. It's easy to use, very easy to understand, and it served me well. The occasional merge could be... problematic, but eventually I had to change because my main project got too big for Darcs.
The command I ran most often 'darcs whatsnew' took 30-40 seconds to run. Importing the repository into git speed things up a little: 'git status' now takes 0.4 seconds, about 100 times as fast! I still have a soft spot in my heart for Darcs, but all my projects are now managed by git.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 7, 2009 11:50 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Yes, they do.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 6, 2009 19:00 UTC (Tue) by amituttam (guest, #55962) [Link]
I always seem to wonder why Mercurial is not as popular as the other DVCS. I understand that git is
basically the de facto in most cases but Mercurial I thought would be at least on par in terms of popularity with bzr.
Also, Mercurial's got an active development community. Written in Python it can be used in Windows
I use both Git and Mercurial and I was going to recommend Mercurial for use at work because of
Thanks,
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 7, 2009 18:03 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Git's Windows capability is pretty darned good now.
http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/
I think it was the last of the big 4 to add this. Hopefully Windows compat is no longer a reason to choose one DVCS over another.
The GNOME DVCS survey Posted Jan 8, 2009 20:25 UTC (Thu) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] And in more recent news, the TortoiseGit project, though only a month and a half old, is rapidly approaching a useable Windows GUI for Git that integrates into the shell, so it should be ready fairly soon even for Windows user who insist on a GUI (where I work, we have several people who do content who need to commit, so for now we're still using Subversion for them, but we'd love to move everything to Git so we're following TortoiseGit and the other similar projects fairly closely).
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