[H-GEN] revision control vs confused operator

[James C. McPherson]

James Mills wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 01:00:38PM +1000, mick wrote:
>> one person currently
>> one location
>> 2 packages of C source code, about 400 files in each (source, headers, auto 
>> tools, support data)
> Unless you never intend to share you source code with other people
> then the suggestions of Subversion are probably a good idea.
> Subversion however is a slow and outdated revision control system
> based on the idea that a repository should be central and has no
> concept of branching and distributing your work is harder then it's
> worth.
> Instead I would highly recommend that you use a Distributed Revision
> Control System such as Mercurial. Other great tools such as Git
> also exist, however I find Git to be terribly complicated to use
> and understand some of it's features and command-set. Git is also
> not very well supported on the Windows platform.
> 
> http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/

Hi Mick,
I second James' suggestion of Mercurial. It's the SCM
system of choice for OpenSolaris and within the next
few months all of Sun's engineers will be using it.

I've found it quite easy to learn to use, it's got good
support for branching and merging, and it's *fast* - I
can checkout or pull the entire OpenSolaris repo (about
655Mb of source) from the San Francisco server it lives
on in a bit under 45 minutes or so:


farnarkle:test $ timex hg pull 
ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/scm-migration/onnv-scm
pulling from ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/scm-migration/onnv-scm
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 5640 changesets with 85665 changes to 48980 files
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)

real       42:09.43
user        1:17.47
sys           16.48

farnarkle:test $ timex hg update
44380 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

real        1:47.25
user          23.38
sys           12.57

farnarkle:test $ du -sh .
  655M   .



By way of comparison, if I use teamware, which is the current
SCM system for Solaris, then checking out the source tree can
take me more than an hour if I do it across the Pacific.


James C. McPherson
--
Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter
               http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
                   http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp
Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson