Version control for Linux (developerWorks) [LWN.net]

Version control for Linux (developerWorks)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 21:36 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: Version control for Linux (developerWorks)

This is one of those awful articles that muddies the subject more than it clears it. I pity anyone who tries to read it as an introductio to SCMs. Just look at Fig. 2! I use svn, svk, git, and p4 daily and *I* find that diagram impenetrable.

Also, as other people have stated, the author totally misunderstands the difference betwen the snapshot and the changeset models. It has nothing to do with the on-disk storage format. In the snapshot model, you browse your project's history by file revision (svn co -r 441), and in the changeset model you browse its history by changeset number. In other words, if the history were represented by a DAG, are you specifying the graph's nodes or its edges? This distinction is mostly irrelevant anyway... snapshot is slightly easier to understand and explain, and the changeset model is slightly easier to navigate in a tree that suffers lots of branching. Git, in particular, is both and neither.

Also, how relevant is Arch these days? I tried it out in 2004 and loathed it. Tom Lord's oddball opinions on how projects should be managed just got in my way at every turn. Though I've never tried it, I hear bzr solves most of Arch's difficulties. I'm very surpried to see Arch used in this article instead of the (imo) far more vital Git, Mercurial, Bzr, Monotone, or Darcs projects.

to post comments

arch's role

Posted Oct 11, 2006 21:47 UTC (Wed) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link] (1 responses)

I prefer to think of it this way: arch was very experimental and Tom Lord tried out a lot of new concepts. Some of these worked very well, others did not work very well. Arch inspired spinoff and successor projects took the parts that worked very well and did great things with them. Overall, the experiment was a great benefit.

arch's role

Posted Oct 14, 2006 16:13 UTC (Sat) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

I don't think the poster intended any insult of Tom or arch. Yes, arch was an extremely valuable project. Tom Lord is/was visionary, and his work was the critical building block that allowed the rest of the FLOSS distributed RCS tools to get started. But if you are about to create a new RCS repository today, very few people would (or should) choose arch.

I completely agree that bzr, darcs, mercurial, monotone, or perhaps even svk would have been a far better choice for that third slot in the review.