Version control systems

[Austin Seipp]

Excerpts from Johan Tibell's message of Wed Aug 13 02:09:00 -0500 2008:
> I'm also in favor of the switch to Git. The Git model has proved to be
> both more productive and more reliable. And the interface, as far as
> I'm concerned, is *better*.
> 

Seconded. The git documentation these days I find is excellent; many
of the man pages have fairly lucid examples and explanations of their
usage. The documentation on kernel.org is also very extensive. This
software is used by a lot of people already and has proven to be
reliable for projects the size of e.g. the linux kernel.

While it may be true that in the past git was cumbersome and difficult
to use, I can't agree with such an assessment these days. In many
instances, you can probably get away with ignoring most of the more
'advanced' commands and simply using it like any other DVCS. "Everyday
git" in fact, is surprisingly simple I think. I certainly don't think
that the GHC devs will need anything under the porcelain commands
either. You don't have to use super-advanced commands that might
endanger your history (and commands like git-reflog are a safety net
around that too.) You can get far with just a little.

Also, this tutorial (and its sequel in particular) should do well for
anybody new to git:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gittutorial.html

It's really not that bad and should take you no more than a few
minutes to read it and the second part. I encourage those who might be
confused to read it.

And besides familiarity, what does darcs give us that git doesn't? I
find git's core model (objects, trees, blobs and tags are it) more
simple and straightforward than the blackbox that is darcs.

(And although it's already been elaborated upon before I'm sure,
waiting on your tools is nothing but a waste of time. If I even want
to get the latest HEAD, I find I can spend a lot of time waiting on
darcs. I rarely wait on git for anything - it's fairly instant most of
the time.)

So I'm with Johan and Thomas for a switch to git.

Austin