2006-01-11 #1

Wanted: A Decent Revision Control System for a Mac

For years and years and years I've been happily plodding along using CVS 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 MacCVSClient has encoding schemes for dealing with this, albeit with some user involvement.

So what of Subversion? 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 darcs, a revision control system written in Haskell (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.