Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Ports-like package management system

[Paul Pelzl <pelzlpj@eecs.umich.edu>]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 06:35:08PM +0100, Berke Durak wrote:
> I'll rank required VCS features :
> 
> * Distributed nature (for easy collaboration)
> * Portability (Windows)
> * Speed (for fast checkouts)
> * Reliability
> * User community
> * Ease of use (not a big concern since the VCS commands would be called
> by the distribution management code anyway)
> * Advanced merging features
> 
> >If not darcs, I would choose hg next.  hg supports windows well, which 
> >is a big deal, I think.  Its user interface was more pleasant than git's 
> >last I checked.  And it has some support for renames (not as good as 
> >darc's or bzr's, but still good.)  We've used hg very intensively at 
> >Jane Street and have been very happy with the results. 
> 
> I've been using hg daily for about a year now and I am quite pleased 
> with it.  My only reservation is that it is written in Python... 
> However, I did a sloccount on Git today and I got:
> 
> ansic:        70503 (48.98%)
> sh:           36153 (25.12%)
> perl:         17731 (12.32%)
> tcl:          14805 (10.29%)
> python:        2839 (1.97%)
> lisp:          1682 (1.17%)
> asm:            220 (0.15%)
> 
> whereas the same on hg gives:
> 
> python:       14610 (95.29%)
> ansic:          722 (4.71%)
> 
> Mercurial is obviously cleaner and more portable.  It runs well under 
> Windows and has only three small files written in .c ; git is an unholy 
> mixture of mostly C and shell (the Perl is in the plugins) and it has a 
> bad reputation under Windows (not very surprising...).

If distributed version control is to be considered as a solution to the
"package management" problem, then any unbiased evaluation of DVCS
candidates must surely include Bazaar (bzr): http://bazaar-vcs.org/

Architecturally, the design is very similar to Mercurial (anyone who
likes hg will probably like bzr, and vice versa).  However, bzr also has
best-in-class support for history-preserving file and directory renames,
provides excellent built-in merging capabilities, and is flexible enough
to support more workflow models than any other tool I have used.  In
addition, at the time of my last side-by-side comparison bzr had
significantly better Windows support than Mercurial.

bzr has recently reached its 1.0 milestone, and is now quite fast and
suitable for use on very large trees (not yet quite as fast as Mercurial
for most operations, but close).  It is a very well-supported product,
with a core developer team primarily employed by Canonical (of Ubuntu
fame).

Paul