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Revision of Comparing Popular Version Control Systems from Sun, 2010-04-04 09:42

Toturial

Why another comparison review!!?

Perhaps becuase many of other reviews are either outdated or unfair.

What's the difference between this and the others!!?

There are three differences.

  1. Most of the current reviews are written by a user of one of this softwares so the author can't be fair since he has much less experience with the others, in this article however i only write about Bazaar and let the users of other DVCSs to participate and write about their favorite software.
  2.  There are many resources available regarding to this topic and each one has pros and cons. But the main issue i have with them is that most of them are outdated because all this DVCSs are under very active development. An issue that exists now, might become a feature! few months later. So i started this article as a research project which means that just like DVCSs it's also under active development :). Anyway if you like to read resources on other sites i suggest you to check the date they've been published before relying on them. (You can subscribe to this page's RSS/Feed in order to be notices of the new updates.)
  3.  This article is practical because it includes personal experiences from users of all these DVCSs, and challenges they've faced using them ,not only what's been written in Documentations

There are two well known type of version control systems, Centralized(Like Subversion) and Distributed(Like Git). In this article i'm not going to describe the differences between this two, however it's important to understand how they work before making any decision. This article can be a good starting point. I consider centralized VCSs an expired type of VCS so i start with comparing distributed VCSs and if you're about to start using VCSs i suggest you start with a distributed VCS. Note that distributed VCSs like Bazaar also support Centralized VCSs Workflow.

It's about the sixth years since my first commit using Subversion, Moving from CVS to Subversion was eally amazing, Subversion was superior in many ways and it served me well. But the age of centralized version control systems is over, we need much more powerful VCSs to deal with huge projects. Now days we should to be able to work with anyone, on anything, anywhere , at anytime, and also keep track of all this activities.

The age of single all-in-one solution is over in many fields including Version Control Systems, each solution has its own pros and cons and Same applies to VCSs. So in this article i'm going to compare three major DVCSs available.

My main focus on this article is Bazaar since i've decided to start (You can read why i decided to start with Bazaar at the Conclusions section) but i asked my friend Antoni who is a Mercurial(HG) user to help with all sections related to HG. Kudus to him. Currently i use whygitisbetterthanx.com site for Git but i'm also looking for Git user to share his personal experience by using Git with me. So if you're Git user i'll be more than happy to hear your opinion :)

Installation

Bazaar

Karmic :
Add this repository for Bazaar gui (known as bazaar explorer)

ppa:bzr-explorer-dev/ppa

If you're not using Ubuntu Karmic more information here :  https://launchpad.net/~bzr-explorer-dev/+archive/ppa

sudo apt-get install bzr bzr-explorer bzr-svn

Migration

Obviously any DVCSs without proper migration utilities is useless for most projects, so lets see what each one has to offer.

Bazaar

To get started with bazaar as fast as you possible with subversion background : BzrForSVNUsers - Bazaar Version Control and Bazaar for Subversion users — Bazaar Migration Docs

You might want to have look at Migrating from Subversion to Bazaar (Including special guide for Sourceforge projects)

Note : While i was trying to migrate one of my sourceproject from svn to bzr, i came into some very nasty issue due to the difference between server and local bzr version, however bazaar developers say that in 2.x serious and upwards it's no longer a issue. bazaar supports various different tree formats which can causes lots of headaches. this command helped https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/517

Performance

Bazaar

Git

Mercurial

Features

All of the major DVCSs have the important features so i'll skip the feature that are available on all of them. Also this part is mostly a respond to whygitisbetterthanx.com  because it seems that the information they're providing is not accurate.

Cheap local branching

Bazaar

As far as i know Bazaar supports this feature, also it might be interesting to have a look at Filtered views — Bazaar v2.2.0dev1 documentatio

Git

According to whygitisbetterthanx.com git has this feature in a very good way!

Mercurial

Staging

Git

According to whygitisbetterthanx.com git has this feature in a very good way!

Bazaar

Bazaar has this feature but not out of the box, they only thing you need to do is creating another branch and bind you current branch to it, then commit you changes to that branch. when you're finished you can bind that branch to any branch you want and push/commit the changes! instead of directly committing your changes.

Mercurial

GUI

With lots of tools available out there , having a good GUI is getting more critical everyday and i think the main reason is because it decrease the learning curve dramatically.

Bazaar

Integration

Software development without using third-party applications and IDEs is a waste of time! So we should able to use our favoride VCS via our favorite IDE!

Bazaar

Has a plugin for Eclipse, the installation process was not as smooth as subeclipse but i can't say that it was difficult. i had to manually add the bzr binary and plugin folders location and also configure few options (All couldn't be pre configured). But according to BzrEclipse roadmap, it's going to be much better soon. number of feature is also very limited comparing to subeclipse.

Mercurial

Mercurial is much better integrated with other applications, for example currently netbeans does not support Bezaar. more information here IDEIntegration - Bazaar Version Control

Roadmap

All major DVCSs are under active development, which means that their roadmap plays an important role in the decision.

Bazaar

Bazaar roadmap And also it looks like that bazaar developers really care about their users ThreeWishes - Bazaar Version Control , Bazaar also has Bazaar Performance Roadmap

Plugins

Bazaar

Bazaar like the other three supports plugins , in my experience installing Bazaar plugins is as easy as downloading and then extracting it into the plugins folder. That's it. it's even easier even windows.

Notes

There is a nice website for comparing git vs others, very useful. Funny thing is that HG users did the same! but made their point quite clear! Also Git users made another one for Bazaar!

There is also another website for comparing Bazaar and Git , they approach is interesting and it's based on personal experience using Tweeter! http://www.bzrvsgit.com/

Conclusions

In this part you can read the main reasons that people use particular

Bazaar

I decided to start with Bazaar for several reasons

  • It's written with python and for this reason it's much easier to extend and develop than C or C++.
  • It's a multi purpose VCS covering several different Use Cases (Workflows)
  • It's plugin system is quite easy to use (With no compiling or building process)
  • It comes with several great cross platform GUI utilities

News

More and more software and developers are migrating to DVCSs, here you can read their favorite DVCSs

Resources

Your rating: None Average: 2.4 (47 votes)

Comments

Jelmer Vernooij's picture

SourceForge's outdated bzr

Unfortunately your issues with Bazaar seem to be caused by the fact that SourceForge is still running an old version of Bazaar. The format issues all have been resolved as of Bazaar 2.0.

admin's picture

Thanks Jelmer for the

Thanks Jelmer for the tip.
Yes i noticed that after playing with Bazaar for a while. Unfortunately i have to stick with Sourceforge's old Bazaar :(, i hope they upgrade to v2 soon.
I manged to convert one of my projects to Bazaar successfully and i'm writing an easy migration guide for Sourceforge's svn users.

Pooya Sanooei's picture

I can't use anything but git

I can't use anything but git cause it's a nightmare to migrate or start another VCS learning curves. I still have second thoughts about Bazaar. btw never heared of directory track feature.

quite useful

Web Application Development's picture

Thanks jelmer

Excellent post....I really appreciate this site & thank you so much sharing with us.