Git: A review by a not-gonna-use-it-er

This is in response to Drave and Xiper’s questions about my nixing of Git as an option for a replacement version control system.

“Git” is an incredibly popular distributed version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. The fact that it is used by the Linux Kernel development team has given it a firmly established base in Linux development. Add in the “github” project hosting service and it has stealthed into the position of dominant “revision tool thingy” that RCS once held.

“Mercurial” is another popular distributed version control system, lurking in the shadows.

So why did I nix Git and start looking more at Mercurial?

SVN: 4 weeks in

Generally finding the switch from Visual Source Safe to SVN a boon, but there are definitely some areas where it’s weaker than you’d expect. In particular, we’re running into a few simple ball breakers:

Line Endings. Oh. My. God. When we populated the repository, we didn’t even think about this. Get this, using the Microsoft version control solution it wasn’t an issue. Ha – who’d think the first point for VSS vs Open Source RCS would be a cross-platform issue? (Anyone with coins inserted in their brain meter)

So, none of our files have svn:eol-style native. That’s the fix. But if I svn propset svn:eol-style native */*.cpp */*.h there’s just one minor itty bitty niggle: it changes every line in every file completely destroying history and blame.

Subversion

Well, we went ahead and did it; switched from Visual Source Safe to Subversion. Ahh. The producers see TortoiseSVN and want it, so our data will be going over soon too. Right now we’re running VisualSVN server on our Windows file server and their client for Visual Studio.

I’m now trying to set up commit hooks and running into brick walls. I wanted to avoid having to write something myself and though the Ruby commit-mailer.rb sounded promising. Except, it appears that Ruby no-longer ships with ruby-svn and I can’t figure out where the heck you would get it from.

So, I guess I’ll do something with the Perl version. That’s not so bad, really, I can make it announce commits to the IRC server while I’m at it :) Or, more likely, have it write the announcements to a database and let something else pick them up.