On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, John Gateley wrote: > Adam Monsen wrote: >> Mail-Followup-To: TCLUG <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> >> >> >> Great! Please feel free to forward on the invite. > >>> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009, Jeremy wrote: >>> >>>> The next TCLUG meeting is Tue Jan 20th! >>>> >>>> UofM EE/Csci Building Room #3-125 >>>> >>>> Adam will be talking about Version Control: > > Hi Adam, > > A couple of questions: > will you be talking about the difference between SVN and Git/Mercurial? > > Subversion in a recent (past year or so) release did something to make > them more Mercurial-like, I think it was to make SVN more distrubted > rather than a central repository. Will you be talking about this? > > How much branching and merging will you talk about? He has said that he wants it to be introductory so that it can be understood by "a non-techie, brand-spanking-new to the command line," but I don't know if that will stop him from talking about other systems. I personally want to know how the various approaches to version control are different. I've used both CVS and Subversion in a very limited way - just to download someone else's code, so I don't even know how CVS and Subversion differ, and I think they are very different (you don't have to tell me because I can look it up!). I've been looking around for more info, so I'll sharing some of my findings here. I'm going to try to read this before Tuesday: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2007/jw-09-versioncontrol.html Wikipedia seems to prefer the term "distributed revision control" software to "distributed version control systems" (DVCS). They have a general article and a list of such software programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revision_control_software At the second URL you will find links to Wikipedia entries for more than a dozen "open source" revision control software projects. You can also read on Wikipedia about revision control (not necessarily distributed)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control ...and their "comparison of revision control software": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software That page shows this nice table of program features... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software#Features ...where I see that one Free Software program gets "Yes" for every feature and that program is SVK -- it "uses the Subversion filesystem but provides additional features:" * Offline operations like checkin, log, merge. * Distributed branches. * Lightweight checkout copy management (no .svn directories). * Advanced merge algorithms, like star-merge and cherry picking. * Changeset signing and verification. * Can mirror and operate on Subversion, Perforce and CVS repositories I notice that GNU arch gets mentioned a lot. Mike