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Possible Duplicate:
What is the difference between all the different types of version control?

Dear all:

I have just started to use SVN for version control but there always is a lot of talk going on about Version Control system like GIT, Mercurial, SVN, CVS etc.

What makes one version control system better from another? Or Is one type of version control system good for one task and another type good for some other task? Or Are all the version control system basically the same?

Community
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sul4bh
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  • Have you considered that this question just might have been asked before? –  May 30 '09 at 17:54
  • Can I ask why the people answering this are doing so? It is so obviously a dupe. –  May 30 '09 at 17:58
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    You know, I really dislike the attitude here that a question can only be asked once. – Wayne Molina May 30 '09 at 18:00
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    @Wayne M: what's the point of allowing the same question to be asked twice? – Zifre May 30 '09 at 18:02
  • @Wayne M. If you want to answer, add it to the question that this is a dupe of. –  May 30 '09 at 18:05
  • By one way or the other, I got my answer. Thanks. – sul4bh May 30 '09 at 18:06
  • Or, if you want to bump the question, which is generally frowned upon if all you do is bump, because you don't like the answers, edit the question to add more information of your own, this will put the question (not your question, the original one) back on the front page and might provoke people to answer or edit the answers. – Lasse V. Karlsen May 30 '09 at 18:09
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    @Wayne M: Why, theres no problem asking a question twice, the point is that community members can vote to close a question that's been asked before, as long as they point the OP to that duplicate. Either way the OP gets his answer, while the already highly voted questions remain/become more popular etc... it just prevents good answers from becoming diluted spread out in searches. – Eoin Campbell May 30 '09 at 18:10

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No, I don't think they're the same. The centralized (e.g., SVN, CVS, etc.) versus distributed (Git, Mercurial, etc.) repository is a fundamental difference that reflects the way your development team operates.

I use SVN. I think that my organization's collective heads would explode if a distributed SCM system like Git was introduced. It's such a different concept for most people.

duffymo
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Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCSs) like GIT, Mercurial and Bazaar do collectively have advantages in flexibility of workflow and operation compared to centralized CVSs such as SVN or CVS. See the discussion on wikipedia.

As for the choice among DVCSs, that's as highly debated as (say) that between vi and emacs;-). On a "horses for courses" basis you might pragmatically pick hg (Mercurial) if you're going to be using code.google.com, Bazaar if you're going to use Launchpad, GIT if you're going to use github, for example.

Alex Martelli
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Most of it is personal preference; Git and Mercurial are distributed source control systems, and better if you have a distributed team; for the majority of development environments where the team is in the same location or connected to a single server, then the regular version control systems like Subversion are good enough.

I've used Git and like it, but I actually like Subversion better. If you're using SVN you should be fine.

Wayne Molina
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