Re: CVS alternatives?

From: Bruce Stephens (bruce+usenet_at_cenderis.demon.co.uk)
Date: 07/22/03 

Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 12:49:52 +0100

mru@users.sourceforge.net (Måns Rullgård) writes:

> Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
>
>>> I haven't used cvs much. What limitations does it have?
>>
>> The easiest one to see is that it does not cope well with deletion of
>> directories or renaming of files/directories.
>
> That irritates me. Is there a version control program similar to cvs
> in functionality, but with this fixed? Someone said subversion wasn't
> quite stable.

subversion is probably the closest to CVS (deliberately, since it's
intended as a replacement for CVS).

The others work sufficiently differently that comparing them to CVS
isn't simple.

Specifically, CVS versions on a per-file basis, so you commit changes
to each file separately, and to record a collection of revisions of
those files as a consistent set, you need to tag them (and hope that
nobody commits a modification to any of them while you're tagging. In
most of the other systems, you commit complete trees of files, and
such sets are committed atomically.

Aegis is probably the most mature of the CM systems. It encourages
testing, and comes with an extensive test suite.
<http://aegis.sourceforge.net/>. Compared to the others available,
it's horribly well-featured. Having said that, few people seem to use
it. I'm not quite sure why (I'm not sure why I don't use it, for
example).

PRCS is also pretty mature (and also handles file moving).

OpenCM ought to be a good system, but it's just not ready yet.

Stellation is probably quite tricky to set up correctly, and still
seems experimental.

Arch (either Tom Lord's new C version, or Walter Landry's ArX) is
probably a good choice. It's new, but the ideas are quite simple, and
it builds on very stable technology, so it's pretty robust. It
handles file renames and things. And the distributed repository stuff
is well-developed (that's stuff that OpenCM, subversion and Stellation
don't do yet), so it's easy to make branches of remote projects (such
as Arch itself) in a local archive, and it all just works.

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