Brian Aker has blogged about BitKeeper versus CVS

no doubt this has stemmed from somebody’s rant on the BK license. Now, this is a valid rant, but, really – it’s getting[1] old.

Personally, I quite like the GNU Arch Revision control system. Unfortunately, the UI is sort of sucky and takes a bit of getting used to. Bazaar is one to watch for improvements on this front (although I haven’t made the switch, mainly due to there not being enough hours in the day).

One thing that Arch does really well is cherry picking changesets. A simple ‘tla reply’ will do the equivilent of ‘patch -p1 < foobar’, but preserving where it came from. BRILLIANT. I wish bk did this. I once looked at branching in CVS and quickly ran away.

A smaller player, Darcs is one to take a close look at too. The UI is really sweet. I’ve only used it to test/submit fixes upstream on a small project (namely xseq – a project that is way cooler than the name suggests[2].)

In the future, bazaar-ng (back online soon) will probably be the way to go. Now is the time to bombard it with ideas though :)

At least we’re not stuck with Visual Source Safe. Full on MS people bag that pile of poo.

[1] Many would, in fact, believe i should be leaving out the word ‘getting’.
[2] I’m sure Andrew would be appreciative of funky names as well.

Update: why, oh why does this edit post thing think it must fight against the will of the correct closing tags?

Update 2: it seems that wordpress doesn’t want to save an update if you’re only fixing your markup. you have to add text. the suck.