What version-control system is most trivial to set up and use for toy projects?

Question

I teach the third required intro course in a CS department. One of my homework assignments asks students to speed up code they have written for a previous assignment. Fact

Answer 1

darcs send is trivial to setup - when you run darcs send <remote repo>, it looks in _darcs/prefs/email of the remote repo to decide where to sent the email to. If there's nothing there then it prompts the user instead.

The receiver of the patch just saves the file and runs darcs apply <patch file> in the appropriate repo.

So each student can just have their own repos with their own email address in _darcs/prefs/email and exchange patches by email.

Answer 2

For real ease of use for your students, you could install a SVN server with autocommit turned on, shared using webdav. This way they can just mount their directory using WebDAV and will autcommit every time they hit save - accessing the history is easy with TortoiseSVN, the Eclipse / Visual Studio Plugins or some web access solution like ViewVC. For your access restriction needs you could use the integrated subversion authentication (look here) - which uses a simple configuration file for fine grained access control.

Configuration has become a lot easier (and there is better documention now - have a look at the SVN Book), but could get a bit coplicated if you need multiple separate repositories with access restrictions and a web interface.

Autocommit is more a solution for the "my office worker / boss" who has no clue whats going on inside a computer needs version control for word documents. Students taking a programming course should perhaps also learn how to use a decent SCM anyway.

Git and Mercurial would be nice because of their distributed nature, which makes sharing easy - but both tools lack GUI interfaces which are really easy to use (TortoiseHg looks promising, and gitk is a very good Repository browser, but your students would still have to wrap their heads around the command line tools to make full use of the tools). Also the concept of distributed SCM's is a little more complex to grasp.

On the pro side you could use public hosting solutions like GitHub and wouldn't have to worry about a server setup. This also makes sharing solutions really easy, but would break your "only with each other" requirement. But I guess you won't be able to stop them from exchanging code anyway, in my experience with course work I found looking at the code and verifying that it's unique is the only way to prevent copying.

You could also use PlasticSCM, which has really nice interfaces for a lot of IDE's and (at least the site claims) free licenses for educational institutions.

Answer 3

UPDATE: Six years later I would never consider using subversion for anything ever again. Git is the way to go. So, while I still think SVN is a bit "simpler", it is just not even worth teaching anymore.

I've used CVS, SVN, Bazaar and Git (in that order of introduction) and I'd have to say for students that SVN is the way to go. In fact, while I was lead TA we implemented SVN as a replacement for the old "submit script" which was a tar and email script. Labstaff setup an Apache SVN-DAV based repository and using the authz file the TAs and instructor could control permissions for per-student directories and group projects at a very fine-grained level leaving students with a very simple path to their first commit. See my tutorial (credentials ripped out by the most recent TAs.. hmm..)

Regarding the use of subversion without intervention by sys admins, I've done this as well in a group-project setting where none of my group members had ever used subversion before and most of them were committing with very little confusion (all but one). I also wrote a tutorial for setting up such a secure shared repository with only basic SSH access here.

I definitely disagree that git is the best VCS for beginners having experienced the blank looks enough at the mention of any VCS system, let alone the mac-daddy-written-by-Linus-himself VCS king, git. It is simply not true that git is no more complex than svn, and the lack of mature n00b tools alone is enough of a reason not to use it in this scenario. I just started using git for a new project that I am developing in Netbeans and already ran into serious limitations with the Netbeans integration. In a single semester you are not going to use any functionality that svn doesn't provide so git is overkill.

Answer 4

Darcs is an excellent DVCS, especially for smaller projects such as ones for CS classes. I wish I was introduced to Darcs or Git in college, and I also commend you for introducing it to your students.

I use Git on a daily basis. It's a very robust DVCS, but maybe a bit of an overkill for smaller projects.

Take your pick, either of those version control systems are really good.

Answer 5

If you are looking for something that is really really esay to set up, then why not go for the free SVN hosting option, you don't have to set up a thing!

Sadly the two older ones that everyone would have pointed you to being Assembla, Unfuddle, have dropped support for their free hosting ( or at lest if you want them to private ), but you can still use Origo this give you both open and closed hosting.

The advantage of this is that you can own all the projects and follow them all, and easily control the people who have access, and you don't have to worry about right for creating repos.

If you do go this route, and you want to eliminate complexity then you must use a GUI svn application to make learning near trivial ( since I doubt there will be much merging going on ). I would recommend tortoisesvn, slips right into your windows explorer context menu.

Answer 6

Second the choice of Mercurial

Advantages

• Excellent documentation.
• Graphical view command to show branching.
• Cross-platform.
• Comes with a GUI for all platforms (TortoiseHG, or thg).
• Built-in web server for viewing the project.
• Can keep your project on your thumbdrive.
  • Work can be saved even if only one member of the pair remembered their laptop. Not that that would ever happen.

Disadvantages

• Must install Python if not already present.
  • Easy to do, but it is another step.
• Understanding the distinction between push/pull vs update/commit.
  • (This is common to all distributed VCS).
• The distinction between heads and tips.
• Some commands aren't immediately available; they must be explicitly enabled.
  • (This is generally consider advantageous by the community as it keeps things simple; some others disagree though).