On 21/03/2008, skip@pobox.com
With all these distributed revision control systems now available (bzr, hg, darcs, svk, many more), I find I need an introduction to the concepts and advantages of repository distribution. It seems to me that it has the potential for leading to anarchy, though I can see how some things would be improved (working offline, maintaining local patches). It's not obvious how I push changes back upstream. Can someone point me to some useful content (web pages or books) which will help me wrap my brain around the ideas? Maybe a compare/contrast of the major players?
The Mercurial book is good (http://hgbook.red-bean.com/) although it's Mercurial-specific (unsurprisingly). The Bazaar user guide (http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/index.html) isn't bad, either, although I personally prefer the Mercurial book. I've yet to see a really good side-by-side comparison of Mercurial and Bazaar, which is a shame, as these 2 are to my mind, the hardest to differentiate in terms of features, etc. (Mercurial is generally considered faster, although Bazaar has caught up a lot recently. An up to date performance comparison would be interesting). Paul.