Revision Control

This month's GTALUG meeting consisted of series of short talks on four different revision control systems. Aaron Bentley was first and talked about Bazaar. Aaron used to be a core developer for Bazaar so his knowledge runs much deeper than the user level talk he presented. Christopher Browne talked about Darcs, the only one out the four that I've never used. Drew Sullivan presented git, in a rather, um, unstructured fashion. Myles Braithwaite gave a rather frenetic talk on Mercurial as he was running out of time.

Now far the fun part. Which one is better? The only honest answer is none of them. For any typical project consisting of a few dozen developers, there is nothing to choose between the four systems. It is interesting that whenever a feature was held up as a reason why one system was better, it was fairly easy for one of other the presenters to shoot it down. It was all for fun of course, since nobody could hold the high ground for very long and any differences was just splitting hairs.

Trying Git Again

The last time I tried git I had a really difficult with time with it, compared to bazaar and mercurial. That was a several years ago so I decided it was time to revisit git. I was surprised that I actually got a lot further with it this time. I'm not sure why. Maybe the documentation has improved or maybe I just understand it little better. At least I got the point where I am comfortable using the common everyday functions. Don't ask me about the more advanced commands; that will take a little longer to understand.