After diversity of operating systems, diversity of versions of diversity of compilers and forks of forks of favourite…forks of projects, contributors to the world of Free and Open Source Software got Yet Another Nail in Their Asses (YANTA with tm by myself). It is the variety of revision control systems and their clients developers need to install to be able to do their job. In the past the choice was clear CVS and later Subversion.
Today, DVCS is posh. So, an average developer who wants to contribute his cheap liberty to number of Open Source projects, will likely have to juggle clients to three or four kinds of the posh revision control systems.
For Windows systems, we have the whole population of turtles on the land: TortoiseSVN, TortoiseGit, TortoiseBZR and TortoiseHg (hopefully, none of them are listed as endangered species). The stack of these turtles causes the context menu large enough to make it hard to use on small screens. Combinations of authorization systems, configuration files and mess with Putty and MinGW/MSYS dependencies…make participation in this whole libertinism ridiculously complex.
I’m really surprised no one of the Tortoises hackers have come to the conclusion that it would be not a bad idea to merge their efforts and develop single client capable to work access repositories of all the four types of systems. Of course, with single installer and one submenu in the Windows Explorer’s context menu. Ah, and please don’t forget about including command line clients too :-)
Hello,
what a right post at a right time. Since 2 years I am using Bazaar for my own projects.
But there are 3 more shell extensions in Explorer:
SVN, Git, HG.
All DVCS systems can (or try) to import the repositories of other systems. Sometimes this doesn’t work. And write access from bzr to svn, hg or git repositores seems still to be difficult.
All these tools are active in the background when starting windows.
Any them significantly slow down the Explorer at times. Sometimes context menu even doesn’t open.
I see light with the advent of cross-cutting libries like:
http://bitbucket.org/RonnyPfannschmidt/anyvc/src/tip/docs/source/roadmap.rst
So hopefully we shall see a Turtle4All. Some day.
Where can this post be published? It’s important!
Best,
Timmie
Hi Timmie,
I’m glad you share my opinion. Feel free to forward my post to other interested parties you know!
(I really should have changed licensing of my blog from “all rights reserved” to Creative Commons)
https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/81084
Timmie, good idea about the Q&A at Launchpad. I’ve subscribed to it. Let’s see what’s will be the interest.