VCS: Choose yours, but go distributive!

05.19.2010 // Development // Thiago Alves // 2 Comments

Since I started to develop I always was fascinated by versioning my code so I could keep a history of my development, but until couple years ago I never could get any VCS (Version Control System) up and running on my machines.

I don’t know if was the complexity of having a server machine to host my repositories or was just pure laziness but the fact was I never used a VCS until I knew git!

The joy of a DVCS

What most call my attention was the possibility to have my whole repository locally, independent of a separate server! I would have no excuses to not use it, just run couple commands on your directory and I would be done.

Not that fast! One thing kept poking my mind:

And if I loose everything on my hard drive?

If I use a “traditional” VCS I would have all my code backup on the server, and with git? Well,  it turns out that git has a smarted solution for this and is the D on DVCS: Distribution. Linus Torvalds had this idea that every copy of the repository should be a backup of the entire source tree, this way if you look your copy, you can just grab a copy of your neighbor and you have a full copy of your tree.

Of course there are some details about it that you should check on the links at the end of this post, but the important thing here is: I founded a software that would keep history of my projects locally plus allowing me to share my work and as result have multiple backups of my source code.

You might be thinking: Git is the way to go? There are any alternatives out there?

In fact there are!

Alternatives to Git

If you read about git and like the concept but something looked weird, you can still try couple more DVCS. The most famous are:

• Bazaar
• Mercurial

Both are awesome and looks very similar to each other including git.

Anyway, doesn’t meter which software do you choose, the only thing that meters is that now there is no more excuses to not versioning your personal code! Believe me, if you spend some time reading about DVCS you’ll find out that you should be doing it already.

And where can you read more about it?

Further knowledge

First I would like to point you out to the 3 main pages of each DVCS:

• git: http://git-scm.com/
• Bazaar: http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/
• Mercurial: http://mercurial.selenic.com/

Then if you want to dig deeper into git I indicate the following links:

• The Git Book (which is the place where I took the image of this post)
• PeepCode (this one is paid, but definitively worth the money)

I know this post is just too small to talk about git or DVCS but I just wanted to spit it out to start a path for future posts and perhaps one or two articles/tutorials. Keep tuned!