1 Wanted: A Decent Revision Control System for a Mac {anchor:Wanted: A Decent Revision Control System for a Mac} {image:img=coo-mug.jpg|align=float-right} For years and years and years I've been happily plodding along using {link:CVS|http://ximbiot.com/cvs/wiki} for revision control, on Linux, Mac and Windows, via console programs, GUI interfaces, or Eclipse. It has its warts - most notably, the fact that it doesn't believe in renaming of resources - but I've grown used to it. However, I need to roll out some infrastructure to a small developer group, so I thought it was worthwhile looking at the alternatives. CVS is pretty stupid about file formats - it can be told about text vs. binary files, and whether to do tag expansion, and that's it - so it's up to the client to invent a storage scheme for anything more complicated ... such as Macintosh files, which can have filetype/creator information, and can have resource forks. Luckily, Jörg Bullmann's excellent {link:MacCVSClient|http://www.heilancoo.net/MacCVSClient} has encoding schemes for dealing with this, albeit with some user involvement. So what of {link:Subversion|http://subversion.tigris.org}? It does renaming properly, and overall its change semantics seem quite sensible. There's an Eclipse plug-in for it. On the Mac, there's even a nifty Finder plug-in which marks the icons of files according to their source-control state. So, does it support Mac file metadata and resource information? Er: no. It could be done - Subversion has metadata support - but it ain't been yet. So, next on the list is {link:darcs|http://abridgegame.org/darcs}, a revision control system written in {link:Haskell|http://www.haskell.org} (for some serious monad-on-monad action). I'm told that it will encode Mac files, although porting across a MacCVSClient-encoded CVS repository is probably fun. And I think we're solidly in console-land for the time being. 2006-01-11 20:41:32.74 2006-01-11 20:38:41.495 Wed Jan 11 20:39:12 UTC 2006