[vox-tech] DVCS & SVN together

[Ken Bloom]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 12:34 -0700, Alex Mandel wrote:
> I'd like to start writing some code, I'm not really sure if it'll pan
> out so I don't want to go through the trouble of setting up an svn from
> the start.
> 
> What I'd like to do is pick either git,hg or bzr in order to start some
> code and if I decided to migrate it to svn with history.
> 
> Anyone have any opinion on which system to use. The problem I've seen so
> far is that I can only seem to find how to go from svn to others and I
> need to make sure I can go from others to svn.

Migrating to SVN after you've started in git, hg, or bzr is probably a
bad idea. The history of a DVCS repository is a directed graph, and
boiling that down into a linear history that svn expects to work with is
difficult, if not impossible.

As far as deciding between git, hg, and bzr, it really depends what
coding community you're a part of. bzr is most popular among Ubuntu
developers, hg is most popular in the python community (becasue it's
written in python), and git is popular among kernel developers and ruby
coders, and I think it's the most popular in general.

I will point out, that bzr is probably the most flexible in terms of
work flow -- you can make lightweight checkouts that carry no history
and work like svn if you wanted to, and you can't do that with other
DVCS. (See
http://lists.madduck.net/pipermail/vcs-home/2009-April/000210.html )

--Ken