[gobolinux-users] Call for volunteers: would you like to be a recipe committer?

[Dave Dodge]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 11:48:22AM -0300, Jeremy Visser wrote:
> demian florentin wrote:
> > Why not use git? it is by  far the best SCM at the moment, i've used svn
> > for years, just within a few weeks of using git I started doing things
> > that I didn't dare to do with subversion.

> Might I also use this opportunity to plug Bazaar (bzr).
> <http://bazaar-vcs.org/>

Insert obligatory plug for Mercurial (hg) here :-)
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/

>From a feature standpoint git, hg, and bzr are pretty much the
same, as seen in this comparison chart:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

hg and git are particularly close since they both originated with the
BitKeeper fiasco and I think their developers tend to chase each
others' feature set.  For example hg has a graphical changeset viewer
which is a direct port of git's.  hg has a built-in webserver for
read-only access, a CGI script you can use with Apache for (I think)
read-write access, cloning over various network protocols, it mimics
the svn command set, and so on.  Both git and hg have tools for
patchset management: "stgit" and "mq", respectively, both of which are
based on "quilt".

One place where hg can beat git is in disk usage.  You can pack git
archives to get the same storage efficiency as hg, but as I understand
it that's still a manual process has to be done repeatedly.  For a
small repository such as Gobo recipes it probably doesn't matter very
much.

Hg is usually considered to have better documentation than the others,
including a book-length user guide that's regularly updated.

Git probably has better support for converting repositories to/from
svn.  I seem to recall someone saying that the best way they found to
convert from svn to hg was actually to do svn->git->hg.  I think
"tailor" supports bidirectional transfers between git, hg, and svn
(and presumably bzr) -- though edge cases can get tricky, for example
Mercurial doesn't like empty directories.

                                                  -Dave Dodge