[TxMt] which version control system to take?

[Florian Gilcher]

On Feb 29, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Christoph Held wrote:
> [...]

I will advertise Subversion a bit more.

> So: if the requirements were:
> 1) up-to-date versioning

SVN is up to date.

> 2) easy install

There is a great book called Version Control with Subversion available  
[1] that covers most of the steps (which are not many). Download it,  
print it, read it. It does only cover the command-line client but  
everything translates nice to every GUI-client.

One drawback of SVN is that it requires a smart server - so you need  
someone that knows at least a bit about setting up a server.

> 3) idiot friendly

Well, its quite hard to really shoot yourself in the foot with  
subversion. There is a very friendly and active mailing list  
(subversion-user) that should solve all remaining problems.

> 4) collaboration friendly (merging of textfiles having been altered  
> by several authors independently should be doable; see point 3 above)

Merging is possible. Be aware though that merging works best with code  
files (their structure is much easier to make sense of), but this is a  
problem of every versioning system. It will cry on conflict though and  
mark the conflicts.

> 5) offline work happens (branching and merging)

You can branch offline (though discouraged for some reasons of history  
tracking), but you will not be able to commit any changes without a  
server. If this is a huge point for you, consider something different.  
(perhaps SVK, which is build on SVN ;) )

> 6) perhaps OS-independent (in case I can convince those other co- 
> authors)

Sure. There are nice GUI-Clients for SVN on every platform an the  
server does run many. In my opinion, TortoiseSVN for Windows is by far  
the best of them, the only reason why i miss win ;). Textmates SVN- 
Bundle is really nice, too.

> 7) existence of a bundle providing integration into Textmate would  
> be a huge plus (but consider that I may be satisfied with a very  
> limited subset of what every versioning system offers already)

As above.

> 8) not sure if applicable: if a visualization tool such as  
> Changes.app for diffing said textfiles be callable to compare  
> versions that would be great, too. My experience with Filemerge et  
> al, is limited because it does not seem to like UTF-8 very much  
> (which I require).

Subversion can use several diff-tools (2-way and 3-way).[2]
>
> Thanks
> Christoph

[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
[2] http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/archives/002033.html