[svlug] Preventing a Revision Control Flamewar

[Chris Miller]

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

Analogies tend to break when you look at them closely.  They're meant to 
  be admired from a distance, like most things from Andrew Polluck.

> 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.

SVN works nearly everywhere, so you'll never have that "doh, if only my 
vcs worked on XXX OS" problem.

> 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?

For a zip file, I don't know.  I know that for most binary files it will 
do a binary diff of the raw data.  I'm unsure whether it will diff the 
innards of a compressed archive though.  SVN is very smart, and I really 
wouldn't be surprised if it did... but I wouldn't be surprised if it 
didn't, either.