Sourceforge

[Ron Murawski]

The Sourceforge site now supports many more version control systems:
Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial, and SVN

Ron

[Pradu]

The Sourceforge site now supports many more version control systems:
Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial, and SVN

Ron

Which would be the "best" for single developer projects?

[Zach Wegner]

The Sourceforge site now supports many more version control systems:
Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial, and SVN

Ron

Which would be the "best" for single developer projects?

I would recommend git. I haven't used hg or Bazaar, but git is much superior to CVS or SVN IMO. Some people say git has a high learning curve, but its easy to learn enough for everyday use in less than an hour or so. It just has a lot of advanced functionality (e.g. 11 different merge functions) that can take a while to learn, but it isn't necessary.

Also, thanks Ron for the news. I would have thought that they would send out a notification email to project admins, but alas...

[Ron Murawski]

Zach: I watch all the sourceforge project pages for chess engines and yesterday there suddenly appeared all these references to all the various versioning systems.

I used SVN (Subversion) for a couple of years and it worked fine. Lately I've been playing with Bazaar (bzr) and have been quite impressed with it. The command structure resembles SVN, so SVN to Bazaar is a fairly easy migration. Some people may consider Bazaar a little too high-powered for a single developer, but I like it a lot. The biggest differences between these different version control systems is the decision to have a centralized or distributed repository. Bazaar is the only versioning system where you can choose either model or something in between. Here's an interesting Bazaar page:
http://bazaar-vcs.org/Workflows
Bazaar also has a plugin system to add special features, but I don't know if Sourceforge will support this.

The only thing I know about GIT is that the commands seemed a bit odd and quirky (in comparison with my past experience). And all I know about Mercurial is that it is the fastest of all the version control systems for commits and checkouts. I reviewed all of these systems plus many more and chose Bazaar because of the easy CVS migration and the flexibility of the patch model it is based on. I gave serious consideration to Darcs too, which is another interesting versioning system.

Links:
http://bazaar-vcs.org/ (Bazaar)
http://git-scm.com/ (GIT)
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ (Mercurial)
http://subversion.tigris.org/ (Subversion)
http://darcs.net/ (Darcs is not supported by sourceforge. Maybe some day.)

No link for CVS. I don't think anyone uses this any more!

Here is a great page for comparing the various versioning systems:
http://versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/

Ron