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 :-)
