[Novalug] Git vs HG vs Bazaar vs Darcs vs ??? -- was two way sync

John Franklin franklin@elfie.org
Mon Dec 6 23:52:15 EST 2010


Mercurial (hg) and Git are, near as I can tell and from the brief research I did before I chose a DVCS solution, so close to equally useful / powerful / sensible / practical / stable as to be nearly indistinguishable.  Both have strong community support, large projects that depend on them, and active development.  In fact, the reviews of each that I read showed both to be so equally <adjective> that I predict this question will start the MBFWE.  Yes, the Most Boring Flame War Ever.

Ultimately, my decision came down to one line in some blog, somewhere, that said Mercurial was marginally more stable, referencing some obtuse technical merit I've completely forgotten and probably only matters if I have an infinite number of monkeys committing / merging / tracking a project with over 2^99 commits.  And said blog writer may very well have made it up.  

As an iPhone developer, I was almost swayed by XCode 4's upcoming internal support for git, but even that didn't matter.  The command line is where I do all of my repository business.

The best I can say is I've been using Mercurial for a few months now and I'm quite pleased with it compared to the Subversion solution I was using.  Conversion from Subversion to HG was reasonably painless, retained the svn commits and comments, the Mercurial server (also exported via Apache just like Subversion) is low-maintenance and the CLI learning curve (given a background in SVN or CVS) was shallow.  My jump was done (a) to learn a DVCS, and (b) so I can commit where ever, whenever I please -- riding on a plane or a train, sitting in a house, with a mouse, even on a ferry, with Katy Perry!

jf

On Dec 6, 2010, at 11:04 PM, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:

> Bingo! We have hit the Trifecta! Three people saying the same thing. You need a VCS.
> 
> However svn over ssh will work nicely if you can designate a Central Repo. In fact, I have been carrying around my SVN Repo on a flash drive for 130 revisions.
> I finally put it on a host at work and did a "svn switch --relocate file:///svn svn+ssh://server.at.work/svn" and it worked quite nicely.
> 
> But assuming you want a DCVS...who prefers what and why?
> 
> I'm leaning towards Git because of Linus and GitHub, but I could be swayed otherwise, maybe.
> 
> Sway Away.
> 
> JIM
> 
> P.S. To answer Fredrik's first question: You assume that the younger copy is the Master and hope that only one copy is modified. 
> You could also record a local backup copy when a change is made and table any updates received (think: .rpmnew) to a locally modified copy, but now you are reimplementing a VCS.
> 
> On 12/6/2010 10:34 AM, Fredrik Nyman wrote:
>> How do you want the synchronize the files if neither is the master?
>> If you are working with documents, source code and the like, I
>> recommend that you look at Mercurial, which has very good support for
>> this kind of synchronization.  The tutorial at hginit.com is an
>> excellent starting point.
>> 
>> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 1:42 AM, Jon LaBadie <novalugml@jgcomp.com> wrote:
>>> I'd like to keep in sync several text files between
>>> two systems.  Changes might be made to either or both
>>> files between syncs, so neither is a "master".
>>> 
>>> Anyone have a recommendation of a tool to deal with
>>> this situation?
>>> 
>>> I thought unison might be the solution but I've been
>>> unable to do 2-way sync with it.  And unison is very
>>> sensitive to similar versions on each system.
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml@jgcomp.com
>>>  JG Computing
>>>  12027 Creekbend Drive          (703) 787-0884
>>>  Reston, VA  20194              (703) 787-0922 (fax)
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-- 
John Franklin
franklin@elfie.org
ICBM: 39º 01' 58.4"N 77º 24' 49.6"W Z+84m

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