[vox-tech] DVCS & SVN together

[Alex Mandel]

Ken Bloom wrote:
> 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

Could you explain more about the history difference or point me to some
examples. I actually found that bzr does have a push to svn and since I
basically want to seed an svn with one branch that's never been merged
in my head it seems to work.

On a related thread, in choosing between the various DVCS which one
works best with windows clients, specifically in regards to being able
to merge branches across a network. It could also be framed as which one
is easiest to host branches on a server much like the online services do
 but internal only.

Thanks
Alex