[Adium-devl] Version Control

[David Smith]

This is the somewhat overdue writeup of what was discussed at the  
meeting ( http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/AdiumMeetings/2008-01-24 ), and  
what our current status is.

Brief summary:
	• Majority opinion is strongly with Mercurial
	• Installation instructions at http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/InstallingMercurial
	• SVN importer doesn't like multi-branch commits; Peter and Colin are  
fixing it, then we'll be able to clone a full Adium tree and really  
start testing
	• http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbook.html is the best documentation  
I've read so far (thanks Peter!)
	• Main other candidates were svn, git, bzr
		• git is complicated/hard to learn, and doesn't do nice rev #s
		• bzr is slowish and lacks record (has shelve, but that's a little  
less powerful). There was some skepticism about the lack of adoption  
elsewhere in the industry as well.
		• svn lacks local commits and branches, record, and fancy dvcs merging

Until the importer is improved, it's difficult to really get a feel  
for things like speed and large-project workflow, so hopefully that  
will be finished soon. For those people who really don't care about  
DVCS features, it looks like it should be possible to use the alias  
plugin to get the UI looking relatively identical (see the  
sample .hgrc here: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunOnMac/MercurialTips  
for how to enable aliases, and what the syntax is) This is good, since  
there were at least two people in the discussion who were definitely  
unhappy about moving away from svn, and I'd rather not leave them out  
in the cold.

Other version control systems briefly discussed included darcs  
(removed from consideration because only one person liked it, and  
several detested it), monotone (nobody in the discussion likes it)

											David