Is there a version control client that would support more VCSs? I'm mainly interested in Subversion, git and Mercurial, but others like TFS would be nice too. Like a bare Eclipse with just the right plugins installed?
Update: I'm looking for a GUI client although a command line one would be technically interesting too.
Amp's goals are to support all major repository formats, all major network protocols, all major workflows and all major commandline interfaces. However, at the moment it only supports Mercurial. Support for Git, Bazaar, Subversion, CVS and darcs is planned.
As for TFS: is there even an open specification for it? If not, then implementing another client would basically amount to massive amounts of reverse engineering. Judging by other attempts at reverse engineering Microsoft protocols, formats and products, we can assume that this is going to take at least 10 years.
Both Git and Mercurial have adapters that let them talk to Mercurial, Git, and Subversion.
I don't know of any implementations of a TFS client other than Microsoft's.
Related
Hi
I'm currently seeing a need for handling source code for a few projects I'm working on. I have no need for external hosting, but I do need to have a structure internal in my development environment.
So, how would you guys recommend to handle this? To you just place the files on a file share in your environment, or do you set up some kind of versioning systems? I'm quite new to this, but I would like to have some way of getting back to old versions of my code, I would like to have the source code centrally stored so I can reach if from bothmy laptop and workstation.
/Andy.l
Use a source control management system - I would suggest using a distributed one such as Git or Mercurial, so you don't need a server or need to be online to work.
You can still have a central location where you push and pull stuff from if you really want to.
If you must have a server, go with SVN - it is easy to setup and widely used.
With all of these options, there are hosted services that you can use as a central store.
If you are using windows OS, then Visual SVN is quite good. You can install it on the server and use a client like Tortoise SVN to connect to it from other machines. The basic version is free to use.
Definitely use a version control system, it will allow you to do some nice workflows on your coding day and have all securely stored. There are several good free vcs (git, mercurial, subversion, etc). For Some time I used a combination of git + dropbox or sugar sync to back up and share my repos
http://git-scm.com/
Do setup a source control repository. Using a SCM, has nothing but benefits.
With respect of what SCM system to chose, to very simple repositories to setup and learn are Mercurial (distributed), and Subversion (centralized). I know you said you wanted centralized access to your sources, but keep in mind that that doesn't meant you can't use Mercurial for that purpose.
Here's a great tutorial on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky.
Lots of choices based on environment, etc.
SVN is an excellent all-around choice for centralized source control. You can also use Mercurial and Git internally if you prefer DVCS (even in a local environment).
In any case, regardless of what version control system you have - get one. Even if it's just one developer doing personal projects, source control is a must.
There's no question that setting up a SCM makes sense and has only advantages. Which SCM to use depends on several circumstances:
Do your co-workers already know any SCM? We're using SVN and I think it would be quite hard to teach my colleagues the concepts of a DVCS like git
In my opinion, using a DVCS like git needs more discipline during work: you have to remember to push to the central repository.
But this is also an advantage: you can create your own development branches and work on them without publishing them to the rest of your colleagues (saves reputation in some cases :-))
If you or your co-workers often work from remote, using a DVCS is more comfortable than using a centralized one like SVN: you need no connection to your central repository but can still checkin, create branches and (quite important) view the complete history of your project without connecting (e.g. via VPN) to your servers at work.
For a centralized VCS, I can recommend SVN (setup as Hps supposed)
As DVCS I can recommend Git (msysgit with tortoisegit)
If you decide to use SVN, you can still use git-svn on the clients: the repository is being run with SVN, but anyhow, you get the advantages of a DVCS while being offline.
What kind of code (what coding languages) can I use GitHub for? Can I use it for websites? Flash? Can I upload images files and other resources?
(I am completely unfamiliar with Git and SVN.)
On git, svn and mercurial:
git, svn, Mercurial are all version control systems. svn was a great improvement over cvs, a commonly used version control system prior to emergence of new VCS. svn like cvs has a client-server model. git and mercurial provides a distributed version control system that does not depend on network as any repository is self contained with all the history and change records. Of course, there are other goodies.
Remember that version control system solves the problem of "the cat ate my code". You can use it to track any kind of development - code, text documents etc.
On github, bitbucket, code.google.com and codplex:
These provide additional goodies on top of what a version control system provides.
They provide you storage for keeping your repository, which you can access and share with the world.
When you share code, you would want to also provide documentation. They provide wiki support for this purpose.
They also provide ticketing / bug management system which can ease a development project.
In short, they provide various tools that can help in project management and development of your code.
Since you are getting to whet the knowledge in some of these areas, following links will be a very useful introductions:
a-visual-guide-to-version-control
intro-to-distributed-version-control-illustrated
You can use GitHub for any source code you want to manage.
But you actually can also use GitHub for your blog(!), the idea being that you would manage your articles and their revisions as you would for a source code base.
(Example: git-blog)
More general documentations: GitHub features (wiki, issue tracking, code review...).
Git does not restrict the kind of files you can track with it... use Github for anything your project needs to track!
Check out http://help.github.com/ for some documentation on how to get started using Git in conjunction with GitHub.
Version control can be applied to ANY file type. From text to images to Flash to whatever. Subversion is my Version control system of choice, and I host my own Subversion server.
As for Git. Well Git is just another version control system. Again, the same rules apply, you can version any file-type. Git-Hub is a public Git server that you can register for and use. You can make your repository public or private.
You cannot however host a site on git-hub. You can do rudimentary blogs, and use the git-feeds to feed your site, but you can't really use it as a traditional web site.
What were the reason for chosing Mercurial as a basis of FogCreek Kiln, a source control management system with tightly integrated code review, and FogBugz integration?
Why Mercurial, and not other (distributed) version control system, like Bazaar, Git or Monotone, or creating own version control system like Fossil (distributed software configuration management, including bug tracking and wiki) did?
What were features that make FogCreek choose Mercurial as Kiln engine?
Here's an answer from one of the Kiln developers.
It provides real branching.
It's easy to use.
Windows support is very good.
It's fast.
It's powerful.
It's easily extensible.
Check out the full details here. They explained themselves quite thoroughly.
Original answer (Nov. 2009, GitHub has only 1 years, Git only 4)
I really do not know, but I would venture "better Windows support", Windows being potentially the main platform for most of their client base.
Git is still too much a "unix/linux" product, with a "hopeful" Windows support through mSysGit.
Just read the tone of some of the MSysGitHerald articles, like the ninth one:
For a very long time, msysGit was pushed forward by the gang formed of Hannes, Steffen, Sebastian Schuberth and myself [Johannes Schindelin]. At some stage I got so frustrated that I stopped working on msysGit altogether. The reason is simple: it was no more fun. Way too many people asked for fixes or enhancements, and none of them offered contributions of their own. As I am not a Windows person (being a happy Linux user since 1994), the work on mSysGit was not rewarding enough for me to continue. So I stopped.
But in the meantime, things have changed.
We got contributions by ...
That does not inspire a great deal of confidence when it comes to push forward that tool to your IT boss. I am very happy with Git for a personal usage, and very grateful from the hard work of all mSysGit contributors, but in a big company, I would have a hard time making Git the default DVCS tool adopted by our Windows developers.
Both because of the learning curve, but mainly because the support level is not there yet.
That is only a personal opinion, and if you have a different experience deploying Git successfully, more power to you.
Mercurial being the closest DVCS to Git, and based on portable Python scripts (and not linux/unix-based sh scripts), it may be a pragmatic choice.
Update 2018, seven years later: yes, the Windows support for Git is now a reality.
And Microsoft has its entire Windows codebase into one (giant) Git repository: See "The largest Git repo on the planet": 3.5M files, 300GB, 4,000 engineers producing 1,760 daily “lab builds” across 440 branches in addition to thousands of pull request validation builds.
But this is with the addition of GVFS (Git Virtual FileSystem), which allows to dynamically download only the portions you need based on what you use.
This is not yet in Git native, although its integration has begun last Dec. 2017, with the implementation of a narrow/partial cloning.
Kiln advertises Git support as well:
Kiln, our best-in-class DVCS hosting solution, supports Git as well as Mercurial! GitHub is great. FogBugz is great. What could
be even better? How about integrating them! FogBugz can be notified by
GitHub Web Hooks whenever an incoming changeset comment mentions a
case.
When I looked at DVCS system I like Mercurial because.
The Mercurial developers seems to care about Microsoft Windows users.
The Mercurial developers do not thinks of Microsoft Windows users as being Unix users that are forced to use Windows.
Unlike a lot of open source developers, the Mercurial developers don't seem to hate Microsoft for making money.
Maybe the Kiln developers thought the same...
(All the main DVCS systems are good enough, otherwise other factors would come into play more)
This answer so now clearly out of date as Microsoft owns github and git is now in very common use on Windows.
I can't speak for FogCreek, but I know when I was choosing which DVCS to use many people commented that git does not work well on Windows (unless it's run in cygwin). Since FogBugz is designed to run on either Windows or a Linux systems (from what I understand--I am not a user myself) having an extra layer (cygwin) to run git may have been the determining factor there. I don't know much about Bazaar or Monotone, so I can't offer any feedback there.
I think the issue of hg vs. git is a red herring, as the OS support issue alone is a major difference. The real question is why hg rather than bzr, as these two are very similar and hg developers themselves consider bzr to be their real competition and vice-versa. Sun conducted an extensive evaluation of both when it came to choosing a DVCS for OpenSolaris and OpenJDK. One would like to know what was the process used for picking hg at FogCreek. All we got so far by way of answers (apart from the OS support issue) are generalities.
So now they add also git:
One of the biggest new features is Kiln Harmony, which lets you
operate on Kiln repositories using either Git or Mercurial. So you can
push changes to a Kiln repo using Git and then pull them using
Mercurial. This means that you never have to decide whether you want
to use Git or Mercurial.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 13 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
What is the difference between all the different types of version control?
Dear all:
I have just started to use SVN for version control but there always is a lot of talk going on about Version Control system like GIT, Mercurial, SVN, CVS etc.
What makes one version control system better from another? Or
Is one type of version control system good for one task and another type good for some other task? Or
Are all the version control system basically the same?
No, I don't think they're the same. The centralized (e.g., SVN, CVS, etc.) versus distributed (Git, Mercurial, etc.) repository is a fundamental difference that reflects the way your development team operates.
I use SVN. I think that my organization's collective heads would explode if a distributed SCM system like Git was introduced. It's such a different concept for most people.
Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCSs) like GIT, Mercurial and Bazaar do collectively have advantages in flexibility of workflow and operation compared to centralized CVSs such as SVN or CVS. See the discussion on wikipedia.
As for the choice among DVCSs, that's as highly debated as (say) that between vi and emacs;-). On a "horses for courses" basis you might pragmatically pick hg (Mercurial) if you're going to be using code.google.com, Bazaar if you're going to use Launchpad, GIT if you're going to use github, for example.
Most of it is personal preference; Git and Mercurial are distributed source control systems, and better if you have a distributed team; for the majority of development environments where the team is in the same location or connected to a single server, then the regular version control systems like Subversion are good enough.
I've used Git and like it, but I actually like Subversion better. If you're using SVN you should be fine.
I am planning to bring some "peace" (you may call it organization) to the personal work (small projects, etc.) I do at home.
I would like to use a SCM and an issue tracker which can capture the commits and show them as changesets etc. automatically.
Note that all the above applications are supposed to be for personal usage so would prefer something from FOSS and also they need to be ultra lightweight in terms of the system requirements.
What do you recommend?
EDIT: Following are some of my doubts/concerns:
Git with GitHub looks good. But I am not very comfortable with making my code base public on GitHub. What do you say?
Does GitHub provide an issue tracker? I mean, can I open up an issue on GitHub provided issue tracker and commit against that issue?
Can I have a local SCM (on my laptop) and use some remote issue tracker like FogBugz? But I just don't understand how could a remote issue tracker capture my commits. Any idea?
UPDATE:
I finally went with Mercurial and BitBucket. Working awesome so far!
I would recommend Git with GitHub
I like and use Redmine with the basecamp theme. It supports a couple of version control systems like git, mercurial, svn, ...
For projects that I want to publish I use bitbucket.org and github.com.
I never tried, but would look into git in combination with ticgit ..
If you're going free personal, I'd recommend SVN and Trac. The two integrate very well together with a little bit of configuration. They're also both pretty lightweight.
If you're willing to spend a bit or are working on an open source project, I'd recommend Atlassian's tools Jira and FishEye. I've worked with them as well and have found integration to be very good. They can be a bit hefty though, and I've found the FishEye client to be very AJAX heavy to the point of performance issues.
If you can trust that you'll always be working on your personal projects near your source control server (or if you're doing it all on the same box) then I'd suggest Subversion. I feel the barrier for entry is lower for it than distributed tools like git or mercurial.
I'd look into VisualSVN for your server.
If you're running it all on one box, you can use TortoiseSVN's built-in Repo feature.
My favorite clients are TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN (if you need VS integration.)
For an issue tracker, a simple story board might be better than a piece of software.
I use org-mode in emacs to track personal projects.
I've used various SCMs for personal work. For really small stuff I still sometimes just run ci -l somefile to start versioning with RCS, because I'm old-school that way. I've happily used Darcs for personal stuff, and I maintain that Darcs is still the easiest to use DVCS out there. These days if I think I'm going to be Open-Sourcing the project I'm likely to use Git, just because that makes putting it on GitHub straightforward.
I also like to use personal projects as an opportunity to experiment with other SCMs that I'm not familiar with, so I'll probably be versioning projects with Bazaar and Mercurial in the future.
In the past, I've used CVS for source control, but I've recently started converting most of my personal projects to use git. However, I don't like the way git works with Visual Studio, so I've been switching to Subversion for my C# projects.
For issue tracking, I've been using Redmine which supports all three SCM methods, though it does better with SVN and git.
Lightweight issue tracking, well, you could use the tracker in drupal, if you consider LAMP easy enough to set up.
If you want to be self-contained, git and mercurial are things you can use without setting up a server at all.
Of course, there's good-old-RCS.
I would have to second using the Subversion and Trac combination. I have this environment setup at work and use it for a distributed team of developers, and I have this environment setup at home and use it for my personal projects. They are open source, very adaptable to your workflow and Trac Hacks has pretty much any mod / hack / plugin you could think of in one form or another.
For very personal things (let's say single-user-mode) I use Tomboy (a simple note-taking application) and Getting Things Gnome. If the project becomes more complex, then I used to switch to Trac with svn or hg backend. For next projects, I'm going to try redmine: seems more clean and hipe than trac (:))