Re: Choosing a versioning system (was My dream work log:)

[Oleg Katsitadze <olegkat@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:21:34AM -0700, rustom wrote:
> system that gets invoked is rcs.
> I wonder if this (default) is the best advice to a noob??

This is a good choice if all you want to control is a single file (or
a collection of unrelated files).  Great for keeping track of changes
to configuration files.

> My impression is that rcs was superseded by cvs by svn by.. well... a
> lot of competition!

These make sense when you have a "project" -- a collection of related
files under directory hierarchy.

> This is a genuine question --- I'm familiar with many versioning
> systems but not too good at any of them.

This is my understanding:

CVS is good but has a few flaws.  Don't use it for new projects.

SVN (subversion) is a successor to CVS with the flaws fixed and new
features added.  I've started using it recently and it seems to be
just great.

Distributed systems (git, monotone) are good when you don't have (or
don't want to have) a server to keep the repository.  Each developer's
snapshot is a repository in its own right, or something like that.
(I've never used such a system myself.)

HTH,
Oleg