VCS comparison table

[Sean]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:19:46 +0200
Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> wrote:

> Sure. As I said before, the little add-on of checkouts is that you say
> once "I don't want to do local commit here", and bzr reminds you this
> each time you commit. Well, where it can make a difference is that it
> does it in a transactional way, that is, you don't have that little
> window between the time you pull and the time you push your next
> commit. But this would really be bad luck ;-).

Yeah, it would be bad luck, but Git wouldn't actually let the push
succeed if someone had changed the upstream repo in that small window.
It would complain that your push wasn't a fast forward and ask you
to update before pushing.

> Sure. And at least, if you want to prove that your decentralized SCM
> is the best, you'd better look at features other than the ability to
> commit on a local branch ;-). If you want a _real_ flamewar, better
> talk about rename management or revision identity.
> 
> The thing is that most people migrated from CVS/svn, so they found
> their new SCM to be incredibly better the existing. But it's generally
> not _so_ much better than the other modern alternatives ;-). (and
> don't forget to thank Darcs and Monotone who brought most of the good
> ideas you and I are using)

Heh, true enough.  And the fact is they're all "borrowing" the
best ideas from one another.  All of a sudden the others are all
getting git-like bisect and gitk guis.  And of course Linus has
said that he got quite a bit of inspiration from Monotone
originally.

Beyond the distributed offline nature of using Git, the killer
"feature" for me is its raw speed and flexibility[1].  It's
really nice to be able to branch in under a second and try
out a line of development etc.  Maybe this is just as easy
in Bazaar but it's not true of say Mercurial.  Honestly, I
just can't imagine any other SCM meeting my needs better than
Git.  So I have a hard time taking complaints about rename
management or revision identity seriously.

While they don't affect my usage, IMHO the two biggest failings
of Git are its lack of a shallow clone and its reliance on shell
and other scripting languages so there is no native Windows version.
I'm sure both of these areas are handled better by Bazaar and/or
some of the other new SCMs where they'd be a better choice than
Git.

Sean

[1] As an aside, I don't understand why bazaar pushes the idea
of "plugins".  For instance someone mentioned that bazaar has
a bisect "plugin".  Well Git was able to add a bisect "command"
without needing a plugin architecture.. so i'm at a loss as 
to why plugins are seen as an advantage.