Comments on: Adoption of various VCSes

By: Andras

Andras — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 08:26:31 +0000

I am yet to see a distributed open-source VCS that handles the line endings well. Lack of proper CRLF support is a showstopper to me, but Mercurial, Darcs, Bazaar and Monotone (the ones I’ve checked) are only starting to became aware of the issue. I’m sticking to svn until one of the above ones solves this.

By: James Cape

James Cape — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:06:57 +0000

Best Practical Solutions is the company responsible for “Request Tracker”, (package: rt3) a monstrous, perl-CGI ticket-tracking website.

Unfortunately it’s a far sight more useful for general IT support ticketing than Bugzilla or Trac, which are very development-oriented.

By: Ivan-Assen

Ivan-Assen — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:22:49 +0000

Game development companies, which often exceed 1 TB in the repository per project, swear by Perforce. Certainly nothing in the distributed VCS crowd approaches its abilities to handle huge files. (Given that Linus, the creator of Git, has gone on record to say “Files above 10 MB don’t belong in the repository, this is hardly surprising.)

If you think 100k KLOC is “big”, you need to get out more.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:05:03 +0000

One interesting question is how do the different systems handle line endings. That can be a major PITA when working on cross platform projects. SVN and hg seem to be the smartest, whereas others seem to have a that-is-the-user’s-problem kind of attitude.

By: Wesley Moxam

Wesley Moxam — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:55:37 +0000

It’s true that CVS was ‘replaced’ by Subversion due to the mess that is the GNU cvs source code. However, it’s not quite dead, the OpenBSD project is working on a re-implementation of CVS which is meant to first achieve compatibility with other CVS implementations, then address the shortcomings of CVS (atomic commits and what not). You can learn more at http://www.opencvs.org/ and also http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan07-cvs/

By: Paolo Bonzini

Paolo Bonzini — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:34:29 +0000

I know of a few companies using svk mirrors internally. I think svk’s adoption is “hidden” under the covers of many projects using a centralized svn repository.

By: Austin Seipp

Austin Seipp — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:33:26 +0000

I would say that GHC (the leading haskell compiler, somewhere around ~100 kLOC last time I heard) qualifies as a ‘large’ project using darcs:

http://haskell.org/ghc/

By: Karl Koehler

Karl Koehler — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:29:25 +0000

I have used Clearcase as well, and do know some people who would vigorously defend it. It’s good when you have huge volumes of data under version control, because the data isn’t really copied ( by default ): the live view behaves like a ( sometimes sluggish ) versioned NFS file system; thus, new branches and views are nearly instantaneous.
You mention “Perforce is like CVS or SVN.. “. Well, yes and no ! Yes, it is very fast ( I measured > 10x faster than CVS for checkouts, much for updates, diffs, etc.), but in addition, branching and merging work the way they should ( unlike CVS or SVN, where you get into trouble if you merge a branch twice and didn’t take the precautions ). I’d think that if a centralized VCS is Ok for your model, Perforce is the best of those.

By: Mattias Bengtsson

Mattias Bengtsson — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:28:01 +0000

Work is being done by the darcs-developers to fix the misbehaviour that causes darcs to hang.
Your definition of “big” is obviously flawed, as you also say. One “big” project that uses darcs is the Haskell Compiler GHC btw.

By: Thomas Arendsen Hein

Thomas Arendsen Hein — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:53:16 +0000

Regarding Juri Pakaste’s comment:
Pylons switched from Darcs to Mercurial in September,
but I think Darcs is heavily used by the Debian project.