Bigger AutoIt Project: Source Control

[aisc]

My and some friends want to build a large-ish program with AutoIt. Any teams out there: what do you use for source control? Open source is preferable, based on price alone.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

aisc

[danielkza]

I never used source control in a team, only for personal projects. In my experience, distributed VCSs beat the crap of the old CVS/SVN model. I find simultaneous branching incredibly handy, and I think it would be even more helpful for teamwork.

My first pick would be Git, but unfortunately it's Windows support is far from ideal, and it works much better (if not only) on the command line. It's lack of documentation aside from the not-always-helpful man pages should also be considered if you are not familiar with DVCSs. On the other hand Git isincredibly fast, if that matters to you, and has top-notch branching and merging compared to other alternatives. It is much more flexible, allowing modification of history, rebasing (that may not be very useful in your case, where you have a controlled environment, but is fantastic when there are many people with different schedules that need to sync. their work with upstream releases), etc.

Mercurial has much better Windows support (if you're not a fan of Git's MSYS/Cygwin environment). TortoiseHG is also quite nice (it's anti-virus problems, with Avira in my case, were solved by simply excluding the repo. folders from scanning). Unfortunately, it's branching capabilities are behind Git's: it's way more difficult to create quick, temporary branches for your own work, for instance, but it is still miles ahead from SVN, in pretty much every aspect.

In resume, for Windows development, Mercurial would be my choice. As I mentioned, I recommend checking out TortoiseHG, and obviously, Mercurial's home page.

[aisc]

Thanks for the feedback!

I had never even heard of distributed vcs before... looks interesting! I guess my initial "objection" is that I don't want my team to get slowed down by learning command line "stuff". We want to start coding .

That said, it looks like this might be a possible direction to go: http://www.intland.com/products/cb-mr/overview.html

Says it's free (forever) and appears to be a web based GUI for mercurial.

Anyone tried it before? Worth checking out?

Thanks,

aisc

[danielkza]

What you posted seems like an issue tracker. If you do need one (you probably will, to handle bug reports), there are at least a dozen alternatives, but I won't pretend I know them because I don't.

About learning the command line, if that's an objection I'd definitely pick Mercurial + TortoiseHG. But if they're not familiar with version control, they will have to take some time to learn how it works, and if they come from an SVN base, I'm sure they'll find the small time investment worthwhile. As long as you get the concepts, using the command won't be a problem: there isn't much difference between clicking 'Branch...' in a menu and typing 'hg branch name' in a prompt.

[Quasar Jarosz]

...there isn't much difference between clicking 'Branch...' in a menu and typing 'hg branch name' in a prompt.

Except you can type it faster than you can click it, of course!

Well, I guess your typing speed may vary

Go Mercurial! My version control system of choice!

Actually, Seeing all of the nice UDFs here, maintained on posts without history information, makes me sad. I wish we could move most (all?) of these to Bitbucket! That would be awesome.

[Zedna]

I have seen discussion about this subject already here on the forum.

As I can remember Valik had a good tips out there.

Try to use the search engine...

[Jos]

We use SVN with the AutoIt3 project and I use it for the SciTE4AutoIt3 project and all programs. I created a CVSwrapper which can be integrated into SciTE that both supports CVS and SVN. (SVN recommended)

Jos