Revisions for Comparing Popular Version Control Systems

This article is not finished neither it's cleaned up. I'm writing a migration guide from svn to bazaar for subversion users currently. If you're interested in this topic you might want to subscribe to feed/RSS in order to be notifed whenever i update it with more information.

It's about the sixth years since my first commit using Subversion, Moving from CVS to Subversion was really 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.

Why did i start with 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 develope than C or C++.
• It's a multi purpose VCS covering several different Use Cases
• It's plugin system is quite easy to use
• It's comes with several great cross platform GUI utilities

Drupal infrastructure team has finally decided to use Git instead of Bazaar. I read most of the comments there which was exteremly useful and it clearly confirmed my point of view which i mentioned earlier in this page. Bazaar is the winner at the time of writing this article by both Ease of use and Extensibility. Evaluation discussion for how to move Drupal.org off of CVS | groups.drupal.org

My main focus on this article is Bazaar but you'll see notes from my friend Antoni who is a Mercusial(HG) user.

Plugins :

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

Integration :

Bazaar has a plugin for Eclipse, the installation proccess was not as smooth as subversion but i can't say that it was difficult. i had to manually add the bzr binary and plugin folders location and also coinfugre 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 subversion.

Migration :

What of the things which is very important for is the future plans :

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

There is a new website for comparing git with others, very useful. whygitisbetterthanx.com

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

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

Short Guide for Bazaar To SVN migration

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

ppa:bzr-explorer-dev/ppa

If you're not using ubuntu karmic more iformation here :  https://launchpad.net/~bzr-explorer-dev/+archive/ppa

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

Note : Bazaar changes rapidly and free vcs service might no be updatodate, sourceforge uses 1.18 , in this case you'll need create using repo using old format on local before import.

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 differece between server and local bzr version. bazaar supports various different tree formats which can causes lots of headaches. this command helped https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/517

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

Note: I don't recommend bazaar for non technical people

Note : Be careful with reviews, most of this version control systems are undel active developement, an issue that exists now might be more than fix few month later. Alaywas check the review date before relying on it.

Note : The age of single all-in-one solution is over, each solution has its pros and cons. same applies to VCSs, each version control system different issues

Resources :

• Very useful article for Bazaar if you only want to contribute to a project : http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Working_with_Bazaar
• Exporting as xml : http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/plugins/en/xmloutput-plugin.html
• Plugin for checking commands before commit : http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/plugins/en/testrunner-plugin.html
• http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.0/en/user-guide/publishing_a_branc...
• https://launchpad.net/~bzr-explorer-dev/+archive/ppa
• http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/bazaar_workflows.html
• http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrExplorer
• https://launchpad.net/bzr-explorer
• http://svn.borg.ch/svndumptool/0.5.0/
• http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s03.html#svn-ch-5-sect-3.1.2
• http://blogs.nuxeo.com/sections/blogs/julien_anguenot/2006_04_21_dump-lo...
• svn2bzr - Bazaar Version Control
• Bazaar for Subversion users — Bazaar Migration Docs
• BzrForSVNUsers - Bazaar Version Control
• Tutorials/CentralizedWorkflow - Bazaar Version Control
• IDEIntegration - Bazaar Version Control
• assert(♥) - git equivalent to “svn copy” for forking files with history?
• Using Bazaar on Subversion projects — Bazaar Migration Docs