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

I'd suggest looking at Fossil - It's a single executable with no dependencies to run, operates all traffic over HTTP, keeps its all repository data in a single file which can be named anything, and includes version controlled wiki, bug tracking and a web-server out of the box. Oh, and it's completely distributed.

Answer 2

Regarding permissions, an outside service wouldn't require time from your university's IT staff.

For example, Bitbucket (using Mercurial) now allows unlimited private repos with up to 5 users. I'm guessing each new weekly pair of students is working on a new project together, which means they can just initialize the repository, add the other user, and away they go.

If they are not working on a new project every week, permissions would have to be removed and added, and I'd encourage them to have multiple repos (one per account) on Bitbucket so each student has continued access. (This would be a good idea anyway, but for only week-long projects, it may be simpler to just have one student account own the repo and the other with permission.)

Regarding which VCS, I believe Mercurial will be best given your platforms—TortoiseHg being particularly good for new users to explore, if they're unfamiliar with (and you don't have time for them to learn) command-line interfaces.

Specific to your situation, the advantage of DVCS is their copy on the university server (if there is one) is a fully-fledged repo. You may find it convenient for you or TAs to have access, which should be simpler to setup and would last all semester instead of change weekly.

Answer 3

Subversion on Windows can be as simple as setting up TortoiseSVN. There is a bit of a learning curve for using it (especially if you've never used a version control before), but you might help that by dedicating half a lesson to it and providing some powerpoint slides for them to download.

As for centralization - I've heard of websites that offer free SVN project hosting. A quick Google search turned up this page, but there are certainly more.

Answer 4

I would say your best bet will be to try to work with your IT department to set up a system/method for your students to easily create new SVN/CVS repositories.

Probably you could get the IT department to give you the privileges necessary to create repositories for your students even if they won't give the priveleges to the students themselves. You could probably pretty easily write a few scripts to mass-create repositories from lists of students at the beginning of the semester.

Answer 5

I have had some very good experience with Bazaar. Like Git/Mercurial it is distributed. It is serverless - you do not need a daemon installed on the server hosting the repository, even if you are accessing it remotely (ie, it can work just as an FTP/SFTP share).

A distributed VCS is most flexible. You can check out a branch from a more traditional 'central' repository and gain all the benefit of being able to fork off your own little development separate to the central server, etc and then, perhaps, push your changes back up.

There are import tools for other VCSs such as Subversion though I haven't tried them.

Answer 6

Subversion is easy to install, on windows, linux and mac os x. I don't know what program they are programming in, but the subclipse plugin for Eclipse is fairly easy to install and hides away some of the repository complexity.

And repository complexity? That's simply having a trunk, tags and branches folder within each project anyway. And they might not have much time, but they should get the time to learn SVN (or similar) because it is a skill that looks good on their CV.