| I introduced Bazaar at my new research lab, with good results. Our requirements were: 1. They're scientists who need to do some programming, rather than programmers who need to do some science, so the command line is acceptable but confusion and complexity are not. 2. Remote hosting is not kosher. Dunno, there are rules, apparently there was a bad experience once and the NIH got involved. 3. Everyone has their own work to track, but project ownership can be fluid. Another guy should be able to seamlessly take over one of my projects without losing the history, and with 30 seconds or less of over-the-shoulder explanation on how to do it. If an operation requires significant manpage investigation, they'll probably get impatient and just use scp. 4. None of the machines is expected to be on all the time. The network will almost always be available, but we all have laptops, too, so offline work ought to be possible. 5. Speed isn't a big issue; our machines are suave and everything's on a LAN. Subversion would be OK if we had a designated server that's always on. But we don't. Git has the low-level design figured out a little better than Bazaar, but the plumbing commands are confusing and I couldn't figure out how to make a shared repository temporarily act like it's all centralized, and I worry that a Windows user might come in and spoil the party. As far as features go, git, hg, bzr and darcs borrow from each other like crazy; the differences are mainly in developer priorities and culture. Bazaar's team cares about documentation and usability above all else, which is what I care about too, here, so that's what I went with. |