Version Control and "the 80%"

October 17, 2007

From iBanjo, on the topic of distributed version control systems in small corporate development environments:

In 2007, Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) are all the range among the alpha-geeks. They’re thrilled with tools like git, mercurial, bazaar-ng, darcs, monotone… and they view Subversion as a dinosaur. Bleeding-edge open source projects are switching to DVCS. Many of these early adopters come off as either incredibly pretentious and self-righteous (like Linus Torvalds!), or are just obnoxious fanboys who love DVCS because it’s new and shiny. And what’s not to love about DVCS? It is really cool. It liberates users, empowers them to work in disconnected situations, makes branching and merging into trivial operations. Shocking statement #3: No matter how cool DVCS is, anyone who tells you that DVCS is perfect for everyone is completely out of touch with reality.

I’ve been using git, a popular distributed version control system, for a few months (and I’ll write about it soon).

Marc Charbonneau is a mobile software engineer in Portland, OR. Want to reply to this article? Get in touch on Twitter @mbcharbonneau.