Re: bitkeeper gone in 2 weeks - which RCS?

[Josh Triplett <josht@us.ibm.com>]

Paul Larson wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 22:35 +0100, Ian Pratt wrote:
>>BTW: We now run our own bkd because bkbits.net hasn't been very reliable
>>recently. the unstable tree is available as
>>bk://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.bk 
>>If you don't want to use bk, the open source bk-client and sourcepuller
>>both work fine against it. I expect we'll continue to mirror stuff
>>through to BK regardless.
>>
>>Hopefully we'll get a hg mirror on xenbits.xensource.com soon as well.
> 
> Since it looks like things are leaning more towards mercurial at the
> moment, I decided to check it out.  I hadn't previously paid much
> attention to it since I could see that any projects were making use of
> it and thought it was just too early in development to be practical.  I
> have to admit I was very impressed with several aspects of it, but it
> does seem to be lacking in a number of areas as well.  
 >
> I don't know if this feature is important to anyone but me, but hg
> currently doesn't allow you to pull a specific revision, making testing
> back through versions to find the point where something broke very
> difficult:

Mercurial looks further along than some of the other new SCM projects 
(such as bzr), and it does look usable, but the ability to diff previous 
revisions does seem rather essential for a revision control system. :) 
On the other hand, the easy interoperation with git would be helpful.

Another possible option might be Bazaar (baz, not bzr).  It uses the 
Arch format and interoperates with Arch, but the user-interface is far 
more usable, and has a relatively low learning curve from CVS/SVN/etc 
(unlike tla).  It has all the distributed features one might want, and 
it has the advantage that all the tools designed around arch still work. 
  There's a useful quick-start guide for Bazaar at 
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2005/05/04-bazaar/read .

- Josh Triplett