... and the others?

Posted Sep 17, 2005 1:35 UTC (Sat) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: ... and the others? by ncm
Parent article: Mercurial: an alternative to git

Nathan:

Monotone: On the plus side, it's in a halfway reasonable language (C++, with "hooks" in Lua), and the gripe about performance seems unfair, as that was a temporary glitch that is long gone. On the minus side, when last I heard, it was still considered a bit beta-ish; requires a dedicated server component rather than being reachable over commodity http; and identifies changesets by their SHA1 checksums, which is a bit cluttered.

GNU Arch ("tla"): Seemingly moribund, given first the departure or many developers to Bazaar 1.x ("baz"), and then more recently the resignation of Tom Lord. Tom prototyped his own GNU Arch 2.0 redesign, dubbed "revc" (to fix some of tla's more hideous misfeatures, IMVAO), but nobody's yet adopted it in the wake of Tom's departure. Maybe someone from the tla-user community will comment, but all I'm seeing is unhappiness and a slow exodus to elsewhere (especially baz/bzr and ArX), among this camp.

Bazaar 1.x ("baz"): Recently back-burnered by Canonical in favour of Martin Pool's more-ambitious Bazaar 2 "bzr" (formerly Bazaar-NG) project as the intended successor. ("baz" has been declared to be in "maintenance mode", as opposed to being actively developed.)

Codeville: Close to mature, but still has a to-do list. E.g., last I heard, non-ASCII files and some file metadata still weren't handled. Last I heard, didn't have much docs. Intriguing, advanced merge algorithm that should be studied more widely. Uses SRP as network transport; I'm going to have to read Bram and Ross's reasons before I decide what I think about that. (Cannot be accessed over commodity http, anyway.)

darcs: Drawbacks: How many people can hack Haskell? Stores repository metadata within the checked-out working area. Nagging performance problems (sometimes). Advantages: Good all-around system. Tracks inter-patch dependencies well. Patches from others can retain their separate identity even after integration (are not collapsed/rolled up). Implementation of "cherry-picking" is exemplary.

It's difficult to judge how broad the appeal is, of most of these things: However, I do know that Hg is in commercial, production usage at one non-kernel software house of my acquaintance (Xenworks).

Anyhow, I try to keep up, as best I can. (If I'm judged misinformed and in desperate need of reeducation, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. It might even be true.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com