Scott posted that Git sucks, citing the yak-shaving necessary just to push a branch to another host for publication, and the horrible documentation that doesn’t actually explain the most basic things, except using Git’s own internal jargon. I have to agree with him. I got over all that though, and used it a fair bit, mostly because I loved the speed of Git. There are some things one just can’t get over so easily though.
What was that thing? Well, I recently toyed with the idea of using a windows box for development. Being assured that “Git actually works now” on Windows, I copied my branch to an NTFS partition, and started working on it. Except not. Suddenly git had no idea how to read its own repository. Talking to the guys in #git, it seemed clear that major manual work would be required just to salvage the repo.
Unfortunately it was much easier (once back in Linux) to just rm -rf .git, and bzr init. Admittedly, I’ve also seen one hosed repo with Bazaar, but I’ve used Bazaar a LOT more, so that’s a much higher success rate. I’ve also been considering Mercurial, but I’m not convinced that OpenSolaris went with it for any reason other than the “can clone from a ZFS snapshot” bullet point, which probably applies to all fs-based version control systems. The one compelling feature is forest (aka nested branches) support, which bazaar doesn’t seem to have.
Tags: bazaar, bzr, Development, distributed, FOSS, git, linux, mercurial, opensolaris, version control, windows
