Vivek Khera wrote:
>
> On Sep 20, 2006, at 9:39 PM, cbbrowne at ca.afilias.info wrote:
>
>> If people have had experiences to particularly encourage or discourage
>> others, that would be useful.
>
> I'm partial to SVN, personally.  We use it here extensively to manage
> all of our projects and the transition from using CVS is very quick. 
> Another advantage is that it has a large community of users and
> developers.  But unless we're really encountering problems with CVS,
> why switch?  What actual problem are we expecting to fix?
There has been considerable keenness expressed periodically on IRC on
"changing to something new;" that is why the idea is being considered.

I don't see that there are any problems we have actually experienced
with CVS that SVN would do *anything* to address.

That being said, the recent outage of gBorg represents something where
using a distributed SCM (Git, Darcs, Mercurial, ...) would have turned
the outage into a minor inconvenience.  That is so because individuals'
repositories are equally "masters"; we could, in case of outage, just
work with patches locally, and add them back to the "master node"
whenever it came back up. 

That's the reason I'd be somewhat keen on something other than CVS *or*
SVN...
> One of my developers was telling me yesterday about Darcs and how it
> is used in a lot of life-sciences research (which is what his wife
> does) and the many problems they encounter with locked files and other
> breakage.
I haven't run into that in my experiences, but I haven't hit Darcs
terribly hard; I'm the only user of my repositories, and in the absence
of personal cloning technology, it's hard to get concurrent updates
going on :-).