[Infrastructures] CVS vs Bitkeeper?

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 08:57:06PM -0600, Michael Gersten wrote:

> Has anyone compared CVS and BitKeeper for their usability for
> tracking administrative configuration changes? (Yes, BitKeeper was
> designed for large scale software projects. How does it work on
> large scale infrastructure systems?)

I haven't actually used BitKeeper, so I don't know for sure.  But
since it uses SCCS to store it's files, it probably has the same
problems with permissions and other file metadata as CVS.  At least,
nothing I saw in the BitKeeper docs suggests that it does not.

I haven't used it either, but Subversion should be a better choice for
sysadmin stuff, since it versions all file metadata.  But I wouldn't
even consider using it until it reaches at least version 1.0.  And
Subversion definitely is not as powerful for large scale distributed
software development as BitKeeper.  Whether that matters or not for
sysadmin stuff, I don't know, but I'd be curious to here others'
answers.  :)

Oh wait, I just checked again, and BitKeeper says they do handle file
permissions.  Didn't see anything about symlinks or other file
metadata.

Assuming they work as advertised, both BitKeeper and Subversion should
be better than CVS, except for BitKeeper not being open source.  I'm
not aware of any CVS features which either of the two lack.  Somebody
who's actually used them should probably say, though.  :)

http://www.bitkeeper.com/Sales.Do.html
http://subversion.tigris.org/

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp@piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com