Mercurial vs. SVN vs. CVS vs. whatever

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 7:48 am

I note that Jonsey posted a message on Caltrops (in the thread on the sudden increase in hard drive prices) how the Mercurial source code management system had a number of problems. If you've used other (non-proprietary) source code management systems like SVN or CVS, have you noticed a differerence? Or what do you think of the one you're using?

I've probably installed or used all three, as different projects have used different systems and if you want to organize the files used by them, or in some cases the only way to get their files, is to use their source code management system to retrieve them. And if you want to participate in submitting changes then you have to use the system.

I'm thinking of choosing one for a project I'm doing, and I'd like to find one that has a low to nonexistent probability of losing code in the repository, and has a standard system-integratable tool for checkout/commit. By "system-integratable" I mean it creates a set of commands attached to the standard explorer pop-up menu allowing for a file that is selected to be checked back in or checked out, and so on.

Tortoise releases a client for all three for Windows, and that's what I've used. Uh, it's three different clients, one for each repository type, not a single client that handles all three.

If you've used a proprietary source code librarying system, how does it compare? Some examples include
* Microsoft's Visual Source Safe, which was integrated into the software tools they sold back then (Visual Basic, Visual C), and apparently had problems with corrupting repositories
* Panvalet, a source code management system for mainframes.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 9:22 am

Git is pretty much the standard these days. Usually people who go from Git to Mercurial do it because "who needs all that stuff?"

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 2:46 pm

What I don't care for is the Mercurial plug-in for Eclipse. I will confess that Mercurial itself is fine. It took a long time for me to understand the differences. I don't know how much Mercurial offers if it's just one dude checking stuff in. I guess it's not BAD at doing that, or anything.

I used svn to backup Cryptozookeeper on a remote server. I'd use that and a Windows front end for anything on my home machines going forward.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 7:13 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I don't know how much Mercurial offers if it's just one dude checking stuff in.

It's still invaluable. To give you an example (which happened to me quite often), imagine you find a bug that you're sure was not there two months ago. Trouble is, in the last two months, you've made about 100 changes. Without an RCS, it's difficult to find which change caused the bug. With an RCS, it's a matter of minutes; you simply bisect it (Git has it built-in, Mercurial has an extension for it, but it can also be done by hand very easily.)

Another example is that you don't have to deal with countless backups anymore if you want to roll back some experimental changes you made that turn out to be a bad idea. You just get rid of that branch.