[svlug] Preventing a Revision Control Flamewar

[Bill Ward]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Chris Miller
<lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com>wrote:

> Tom Pilot wrote:
> > Ive seen flamewars in the past about source control.. see below the
> youtube of Linus Torvalds The Dork thinking he is god almighty, going to
> Google and telling them, and all others who tune in,  that they are all
> idiots and stupid for using CVS and perforce... AND THEY LET HIM. If I was
> there I would boot him out of the room or at least call him on being an
> asswipe. So he wrote a buggy kernel some years ago - so freaking what - so
> many other people used CVS and perforce to add to "his" linux wonderful
> things. I dont understand why people make him out the god he pretends to be
> and let him be so disrespectful to them. They need to recheck their spine.
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
>
> Heh, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  I'm all for
> letting them voice that opinion, even if it includes such phrases as
> "you should be doing X" - the moment someone tries forcing that opinion
> into reality onto other people it's no longer an opinion and no longer
> okay.
>
> I personally think that each version control tool has its own strengths
> and weaknesses.  CVS is aging, and without sufficient binary diff
> storage to make it suitable for some projects.  But it's also highly
> compatible since there's a CVS client for nearly every OS.
>
> Subversion (which I use) has good binary diff handling for excellent
> compression of binary files, which is absolutely essential for some
> projects which deal with binary data.  It's also nearly ubiquitous, with
> wide support for many platforms.
>
> Perforce (IMHO) beats SVN, but its price tag is something to consider
> when selecting a VCS.
>
> Of all the DVCS, I'm partial to Hg, but I also have great respect for
> bzr (which Ubuntu uses with great success).  I haven't personally tried
> many of the DVCS variants, but I hear they're good.
>
> So to me a VCS is like a specialized tool, each one being a different
> kind of tool.  Sort of like a bunch of wrenches.  You might need a
> 1/16th inch wrench, but at the end of the day they just torque things.
>
> I was trying to avoid a flamewar about which wrench works best - they
> all do, IMHO, it just depends on the nut.
>

Exactly, and that's why I was trying to describe my nut and hoping someone
could help me select a wrench.  Of course, since all of the wrenches are
adjustable, it's more a question of which one is the monkey wrench and which
is the fancy Snap-On with micron precision.  OK, so I think I just snapped
that analogy.  But you guys aren't talking about MEEEE so I had to do
something.

Anyway based on all the input I've heard, I'm leery of DVCS and don't really
think any of them would quite suit my needs.  So I'm probably going to go to
SVN.

Now, you mentioned binary diffs, and that's of prime interest to me as many
of the files I am dealing with are binary format (OpenOffice.org docs, in
particular, which are really ZIP archives).  Does it really go inside the
ZIP archive and do an actual diff on the contents?  That would be sweet.
And when converting my existing CVS repository, will it go back, fetch each
version, and do that fancy binary diff on each one to create the
corresponding SVN version?
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