Fri, 20 Jul 2007

Version control that doesn’t make your eyes bleed

At the GUADEC closing, Federico remarked:

trying to learn git felt just like trying to learn cvs the first time 10 years ago felt — why is this so hard?

That was exactly how I felt about git for the 4-5 months I spent dogfooding it — despite my respect for the underlying notions in Git, I was constantly perplexed at why basic things seemed so complicated — and in the back of my mind was “I’ve been at this for a while; how on earth is someone new to Linux supposed to learn this?”

And then I tried bzr!

We chose bzr (Bazaar-NG, as it was briefly known) as the VCS for the new Java bindings for GNOME for Bazaar’s relative straight-forwardness and because of our faith in the ethos and extreme competence of its developers. Anyone experienced with the old world 1st generation centralized VCS tools like CVS or Subversion will be able to make sense of it and you can learn from there. Bazaar is constantly improving in performance terms, has a vibrant developer community, is widely portable, and most of all the fact that they actually follow test-driven-development practices (unit test suite has over 7266 tests) to keep them honest biases in their favour.

In production use for the last year, we have found Bazaar to be reliable, amazingly easy for newcomers to the Open Source world to learn, and a big contributor to our goal of reducing barriers to entry. One of my most treasured emails this year has been when someone wrote me saying:

Nice HACKING instructions, really easy to follow, even though I never used bzr before. Attached are 2 small fixes for the configure script… builds on OpenSolaris now.

Newcomer to contributed patch in less than an hour. Wow.

Some people have argued that they should wait to see which 3rd generation decentralized version control system will “win” before migrating away from svn or god forbid cvs. This is, in my view, foolish — none of Bazaar, Git or Mercurial are going to go away; the determining factor, rather, is usability — and that makes the choice an easy one.

Congratulations to the Bazaar team on the release of 0.18!

AfC

git-is-like-cvs, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/software/version-control at 15:56, 20 Jul 2007.

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