Many thanks everyone. Consensus seems to be - there is no consensus (Yay, emacs rules :-) )
Much seems to depend upon what you want to do with whatever VCS you end up using. Since I am no programmer, much of the power of the various systems may be wasted on me, yet some tiny feature that seems unimportant in the context of maintaining code may make a big difference to what *I* want it to do.
Mark, what made you choose git over the other DVCS for actual writing? What do you mean by cherry picking? Do Mercurial, SVN and bazaar give you less control over what changes willl be kept during a merge? This would indeed be an important difference as merging writings of coauthors will be daily life rather than the exception.
For the moment distributed sounds good to me, simply because I tend to work most efficiently when I am isolated from phone, lab etc. Being able to keep versioning during that time, too, would be a big plus in my book.
Christoph
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 9:15 PM, Mark Eli Kalderon <
eli@markelikalderon.com> wrote:
My two cents:
The most important thing is that you use version control. I have been
a happy Subversion user for three years now, but eventually found
myself frustrated with its merging facilities and am now learning Git
(since it allows you to cherry pick the changes you want to merge).
For your purposes, however, I would not recommend Git (not quite cross
platform since it lacks a Windows implementation, I think) and its UI
is not as nice as some alternatives.
I think you might try Mercurial or Bazaar.
There are advantages to using a distributed version control system as
opposed to a centralized one like Subversion, but really any of
Subversion, Mercurial, or Bazaar would suit your needs.
They are all easy to install. Since you don't have Leopard yet (which
has Subversion preinstalled) you can use Martin Ott's OS X binary.[1]
The first two chapters of the Subversion book (available free online)
should be enough to get you working with subversion in an afternoon.[2]
There are binaries for OS X and Windows for Mercurial (I think that
Mercurial also comes with keychain support on OS X).[3] Like
Subversion, it comes with a nice manual.[4]
Finally, Bazaar also comes with binaries for OS X and Windows.[5] And
also has extensive documentation.[6]
You might be well served by downloading them all, spend a weekend
playing with a couple toy repositories and think about how they might
work best with your envisioned work flow. (Bazaar seems particularly
flexible in this regard.)
Glad to hear that you are seriously considering version control. Good
luck.
All the best, Mark
[1] http://homepage.mac.com/martinott/
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
[3] http://mercurial.berkwood.com/
[4] http://hgbook.red-bean.com/
[5] http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download
[6] http://bazaar-vcs.org/Documentation