On 9/20/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne at ca.afilias.info> wrote:
> I have a backup of CVS; Jan Wieck is providing such for several
> projects on developer.postgresql.org; he's generating a dump on a
> nightly basis.
>
> Based on that, I have built corresponding Mercurial, Darcs, and Git
> repositories, those being reasonably widely available distributed SCM
> tools.
>
> I also generated a Subversion repo...
>
> cvs2svn Statistics:
> ------------------
> Total CVS Files:               570
> Total CVS Revisions:          4370
> Total Unique Tags:              30
> Total Unique Branches:           2
> CVS Repos Size in KB:        10069
> Total SVN Commits:            1459
> First Revision Date:    Fri Sep 22 19:14:09 2000
> Last Revision Date:     Wed Sep 20 16:27:25 2006
> ------------------
> Timings:
> ------------------
> pass 1:     5 seconds
> pass 2:     1 second
> pass 3:     0 seconds
> pass 4:     1 second
> pass 5:     2 seconds
> pass 6:     0 seconds
> pass 7:     0 seconds
> pass 8:   109 seconds
> total:    119 seconds
>
> A few little stats...
>
> Repository         Size    Size of tarball
> -------------------------------------------
> Darcs              17660k        4916k
> Mercurial          13656k        4412k
> CVS                18096k        1928k
> Subversion         19572k        5208k
> Git                18444k        9092k

Mentioning the versions here is probably relevant.

> The Darcs and Mercurial repositories are directly usable as-is; you
> don't need a further checkout to use them.
>
> The others do.
>
> All of these tools are pretty widely available, even on Windows and
> MacOS.  There are LOTS of projects using CVS, many using SVN.
>
> Git is obviously notable as the tool created to replace BitKeeper for
> managing the Linux kernel.  Needs RCS, Perl, little else.
>
> Mercurial was being proposed as alternative to Git.  Notable users
> include Xen, ALSA, OpenSOLARIS.  Needs Python, and little else.
> <http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ProjectsUsingMercurial>
>
> Darcs is a bit more "theoretical" in intent; there are a bunch of
> projects using it...  <http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/ProjectsUsingDarcs>
> Neil Conway was using a Darcs repository to track PostgreSQL for a
> while (notably during some of the Slony-II work).  Written in Haskell
> (can be a chore to make available on obscure platforms); deployment of
> repositories merely needs a web server.
>
> Subversion: Requires Apache, Perl, Python...

This is inaccurate. Subversion does not have dependencies (that it
doesn't ship with). It can optionally build bindings and mod_dav_svn
which would imply these things, but they're definitely not
requirements.

-bob