I'll be the most opinionated here:

Use git and ideally use Github.

Hg (mercurial) is a fine alternative but it doesn't have the penetration git has (i.e. Microsoft supports git natively in Visual Studio).

Using SVN is selling yourself short. There are tens of thousands of projects using SVN but many new projects are started on a DVCS like git. Git is where most new innovative projects are happening, and to a degree Mercurial, but I can't think of anybody I know starting a project on SVN anymore.

-Adam

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Kiti Chigiri <kiti.chigiri@gmail.com> wrote:

+1 on the pain in the neck when merging from svn.

Having worked on both svn and git in a cloud hosted enviroment(jira and bitbucket) with a huge codebase, I found git to work much better than svn.

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 9:37 AM, Martin Chiteri <martin.chiteri@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree with @Rad, performance differences between git and hg are negligible since it usually boils down to slight variances on the number of machine cycles taken to do some of the operations. Also, using dvc's takes a little different frame of mind to utilize well.

One other thing I would like you to note is that you should consider if you are going to have many branching and by extension merging operations applied to your source tree. If say have lots modules or features, some experimental being worked on in parallel by different people which are re-integrated to the mainline code every few days / weeks, chances are high that git or hg are better suited for the task. Last time I checked, svn as of version 1.5, was a pain in the neck to do merge operations. It is possible albeit very confusing in my opinion. In addition you lose all the commit history logged during the branching operations.

With git and hg, this is arguably the most natural thing to do. In fact every checkout from a git or Mercurial repository is essentially a remote branch which can be pushed back later. Luckily for svn users there is a git-svn translation utility to assist in doing branch / merge to svn repos http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12605767/git-svn-merging-and-committing-branches. You can use the same tool to work entirely with subversion repositories through a git client.

Martin.

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Rad! <conradakunga@gmail.com> wrote:

Having used all I echo Martin's views apart from the following
- the performance difference between git and mercurial is negligible in most cases

- git allows you to easily modify commits. Some folks don't think this is a good thing. (you can in mercurial too, but you need to do a bit of work)

- to use a dvcs you must really understand the fundamentals of a dvcs. Don't just use the way you use SVN - there are subtle differences that can lead to you shooting yourself in the foot

On Monday, March 18, 2013, Martin Chiteri wrote:

Hi James,

A more general rule-of-thumb is to use svn when you have good access
to a shared network infrastructure and for some reason (administrative
maybe?) you need to have a centralized repository for sources.

Git / Mercurial works well when you at times need to work offline and
the nature of your project is somewhat de-centralized (kind-of peer to
peer).

I love git and *always* use it for my personal projects but I prefer
svn at work. Also in the beginning git required a little more
brain-power to use than svn so it may appear to be less newbie
friendly than svn. Currently, they are more-or less as easy to use.

I always prefer git to Mercurial since they are both distributed VCS
but git is said to be as lighting fast. This should be because git is
entirely written in C, Mercurial is Python-based so it most probably
suffers from the overhead of an interpreter.

Have never used bazaar so cannot comment on it. You can try them all
and make your pick.

Martin.

On 3/17/13, James Nzomo <kazikubwa@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello sw-dev oriented skunks!
>
> I've been raking my head about a SW project for various users, each with
> "slightly" different requirements.
> It's a nightmare coming up with 1 solution that fits all, so i decided to
> experiment with a VC system.
>
> What VCS (among the above) would you recommend for a proprietary sw app?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> *In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.** *
> _______________________________________________
> *
>
> *
>
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