Oriental Version Control: Bazaar
Finally I’ve installed a distributed version control system for my personal projects. I’ve chosen Bazaar for the following reasons. First Bazaar is just a cool name =). The documentation is excellent and it runs without any problems on windows. Furthermore it supports all kinds of workflows: It can be used as a personal versioning tool, you can take a central repository approach like SVN, and of course it supports the full distributed version control madness.
So far I’m impressed. The commands a easy to learn (mostly because the commands are similar to svn/cvs). Even better, the bazaar distribution contains a visual tool, Bazaar Explorer, and Windows Explorer integration with Tortoise Bazaar. Both are quite useful. Another surprise is that you can branch a SVN-repository, make changes and commits and then push the changes back to the SVN-repository. How cool is that? Also IntelliJ IDEA’s support for Bazaar is quite good with the additional plugin.
Unfortunately all the shine feature cast some shadows =(. All the different supported workflows can be confusing. You cannot check out, edit and commit sub-directories of a repository like in subversion. And of course, since Bazaar isn’t as popular as SVN (yet), the tool support isn’t as good.
Conclusion. I like Bazaar so far. (Way better first impressions that git). If you’re evaluating a version control system, give Bazaar a try!
Welcome to the wonderful world of distributed version control systems :)!
I’m a fan of git myself, mostly because of the power it gives me and because it’s incredibly fast. See here for a (totally biased) comparison of the different DVCS:
http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
Yeah, of course git has it strengths. Especially github is awesome. Bazaar’s Launchpad or Mercurial’s bitbucket aren’t as good a github.
Well for my little projects the speed doesn’t matter that much. Bazaar is faster than subversion and that’s more enough.