Do you use distributed version control?

Question

I\'d like to hear from people who are using distributed version control (aka distributed revision control, decentralized version control) and how they are finding it. What a

Answer 1

Have used darcs on a big project (GHC) and for lots of small projects. I have a love/hate relationship with darcs.

Pluses: incredibly easy to set up repository. Very easy to move changes around between repositories. Very easy to clone and try out 'branches' in separate repositories. Very easy to make 'commits' in small coherent groups that makes sense. Very easy to rename files and identifiers.

Minuses: no notion of history---you can't recover 'the state of things on August 5'. I've never really figured out how to use darcs to go back to an earlier version.

Deal-breaker: darcs does not scale. I (and many others) have gotten into big trouble with GHC using darcs. I've had it hang with 100% CPU usage for 9 days trying to pull in 3 months' worth of changes. I had a bad experience last summer where I lost two weeks trying to make darcs function and eventually resorted to replaying all my changes by hand into a pristine repository.

Conclusion: darcs is great if you want a simple, lightweight way to keep yourself from shooting yourself in the foot for your hobby projects. But even with some of the performance problems addressed in darcs 2, it is still not for industrial strength stuff. I will not really believe in darcs until the vaunted 'theory of patches' is something a bit more than a few equations and some nice pictures; I want to see a real theory published in a refereed venue. It's past time.

Answer 2

Not using distributed source control myself, but maybe these related questions and answers give you some insights:

• Distributed source control options
• Why is git better than Subversion

Answer 3

I really love Git, especially with GitHub. It's so nice being able to commit and roll back locally. And cherry-picking merges, while not trivial, is not terribly difficult, and far more advanced than anything Svn or CVS can do.

Answer 4

Using Subversion with SourceForge and other servers over a number of different connections with medium sized teams and it's working very well.

Answer 5

I am a huge proponent of centralized source control for a lot of reasons, but I did try BitKeeper on a project briefly. Perhaps after years of using a centralized model in one format or another (Perforce, Subversion, CVS) I just found distributed source control difficult to use.

I am of the mindset that our tools should never get in the way of the actual work; they should make work easier. So, after a few head pounding experiences, I bailed. I would advise doing some really hardy tests with your team before rocking the boat because the model is very different than what most devs are probably accustomed to in the SCM world.

Answer 6

Been using darcs 2.1.0 and its great for my projects. Easy to use. Love cherry picking changes.