On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 16:53 +1000, Taryn East wrote: > Hi all, > > well I'm currently in the process of migrating to a new computer and am > at the "picking funky packages" stage... > > now, at home I had been using cvs as version control - and I know it's > getting dated. > > At work they have started using svn (subversion, that is) and it seems > pretty ok to me... however I happened to overhear part of a conversation > at SLUG the other day where someone was saying that ?arch (I think) was > better? but didn't get to hear why... > > now... at the risk of starting some sort of religious war... I was > wondering if those that have tried both would be willing to tell me the > relative strengths of the two... or point me at a reliable source for > such information.
All I can really do here is to give you my opinion. In short: it's
horses for courses.
Arch is a very nifty tool and one day soon I'm sure I'll start using it
for everything I do. Its particular strength is that it can do some
amazing things with merging between branches. For cases where I want to
make changes to someone else's project, I use arch and some magic
scripts to keep my arch repo up to date with their CVS. Then, I do my
work on a branch from that upstream repo and any time I want to pull
down new changes, it's really, really easy and pretty much foolproof.
On the down side, I have had real problems in using arch for day-to-day
stuff. My common case in using (tracking upstream CVS) is a lot of work
to setup. I use these instructions when doing so:
http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/arch
Which should give you some idea of what it's like to use. There are
probably some utility scripts around that make it all easier but I've
not looked into it enough.
Subversion on the other hand is pretty much hopeless when it comes to
merging branches, but it is very easy to get up to speed on and is very
stable. It also doesn't leave directories with unattractive names
floating around the place.
Consequently, I generally use subversion for my own stuff where I'm the
only one who has to deal with it (my various personal websites for
example) and at work, where there's only the one branch of development
and atm we're the only ones working on it.
Subversion also works really well on windows and has a number of really
nice GUIs for it. You can also store arbitrary meta-data about files,
which could potentially be useful, but I've not found a case where it's
actually saved me work.
HTH,
James.
--
James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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