Hello Tibor et al, I know that my contribution to this discussion is absolutely marginal, because I'm not a core contributor, and for my little patches, I'm perfectly happy with quilt.
But, like you, I have been following all this SCM-DSCM business during the last few years, and I have a need myself to keep track of my scripts and utilities. My only real experience (read+write) with SCM was with CVS many years ago, and I have used Subversion for downloading a couple of software packages and have some tests with tla, Git and Mercurial. I can subscribe your original conclussions, and I have not much to add to what the others have said, except some random thoughts. As we have settled with DrProject[1], a trac fork that can handle multiple projects our wiki and task handling, and both trac and DrProject have good integration with Subversion, in principle I was favouring this option. But my readonly experiences with Subversion has been quite disappointing when I saw that, when downloading software, it cannot keep the original timestamps of the files, something that CVS does perfectly. This annoys me so much! My tests with Git and Mercurial have been driven by a quest to find a nice tool for distributed storage for digital preservation[2]. We did some stress-test ingesting both with 500 Gb of fat (25-75 MB) Tiff files + some technical metadata[3]. What we found is that both are similarly capable and both handled this load with similar timings and overhead. We were specially interested in Git's content-addressable-filesystem[4] concept and the hash-tree ability to check if two repositories are identical. We havent' concluded anything yet except that, compared with the mighty Git, Mercurial is no toy either. What else? As there is no attractive (to me) centralised SCM option, and being myself a low-profile developer, I'd be happy to go to a DSCM (it can be fun), but the easier the better. I'd be more than happy with Mercurial. Moreover, Mercurial has reached 1.0 this week, it has enthusiastic followers[5], and has an Emacs frontend[6]. My cent, Ferran [1] http://www.drproject.org/ [2] See a summary of our preliminary findings at http://www.cesca.es/promocio/congressos/tsiuc2007/FerranJorba.pdf [3] This .info file contains the md5sum and the output of ImageMagick's `identify -verbose' (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/identify.php). [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage [5] For example, the first comment at http://lwn.net/Articles/274823/ [6] http://freehg.org/u/agriggio/ahg/
