[Scummvm-devel] Switching from SVN to git, mercurial or bazaar

[John Willis]

Evening All,

> recently, SF.net added support for git, mercurial, and bazaar, three
> so-called "distributed version control systems" (DVCS). In the past
> months, several of us (wjp, Eugene, myself, ...) experimented with
> using git via the "git-svn" bridge.

Git-svn (even with its quirks) may be a good halfway house in the short
term.
 
> Overall, these DVCS have some really nice advantages. Like, they
> allowed Eugene to continue working while he was on "vacation" (man,
> Eugene, I hope your family still likes you... :). I.e. you can prepare
> several commits locally (and "massage" them before going public --
> like merging or reordering "local" commits). These tools also make
> branching super-trivial.

Could not agree more. Big fan of feature branches.
 
> All in all, I am interested in moving ScummVM from SVN to one of
> these. For now, I have the most experience with git, but I wouldn't
> exclude the others as possibilities.

Ok, in my experience I would vote for GIT first, Mercurial second and only
pick one of those 2 ;-).

> About the only problems I foresee are (a) Windows support for non-
> cygwin users, and (b) the fact that people will have to learn a new
> system, which is more powerful but hence also slightly more
> complicated... Although i find that after some learning time, I really
> prefer git over SVN for working on ScummVM :).

Windows support for most version systems are a bit of a pain at the best of
times. 

On the GIT front I keep an eye on http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/ and
have used that for a few repros that I needed to work on from my Windows
box. It's rough round the edges but development seems very active. I can't
say I have used Mercurial clients on Windows so I can't comment in that
area.

> Let the flamewar, err, discussion begin :)

Whooosh!!!

John