Which SCM system for Xcode?

Question

I am developing an application for the Mac as a small team (me + another person) effort. We are located in different cities, and have started to see the need for solid sourc

Answer 1

Caveat: If you simply tell XCode to add a project to a repository by giving it the top-level dir, it WILL add the build directory to the repository, which of course is a terrible thing to do.

In order to get around this you have to move the build dir to another location so that XCode won't try to import it, or manually add the discrete folders of a project one by one.

Answer 2

You can't really go wrong with using Subversion.

If, like me, you don't like Xcode's SVN integration too much you can always choose to use the command-line tools, or one of the several GUI apps like Versions, CornerStone or SvnX. Most of these tools work together pretty well, so you're not necessarily tied in to the tool you start out with.

I personally do most of my work with Versions, and use the command-line tools with the same working copies every once in a while.

If you're comfortable working with command-line tools exclusively until someone creates a good GUI app around it, git is a pretty viable option too.

disclosure: I'm one of the people who work on Versions, so I might be slightly biased ;)

Answer 3

Mercurial (like git) is "distributed" and perhaps regarded as more modern and up-and-coming than svn (but less established). If you want to auto-checkin using mercurial, you can add the line:

hg commit -m "Xcode auto commit"

as part of a "Run Script" stage of the XCode build, as found in: Project > New Build Phase > New Run Script BUild Phase

Answer 4

Subversion is the traditional OS X source control solution, in Leopard it's supported in Xcode and OS X, not to mention the third party GUI apps (a few of which look very slick). Despite all of this though, a lot of the independent OS X developers have switched to Git over the past year or two. As a single developer I can tell you Git has turned out to be a very good solution for me, and along with Github it makes a great solution for a small team effort.