DVCS Choices - What's good for Windows?

Question

So I want to get a project on a distributed version control system, such as mercurial, git, or bazaar. The catch is that I need the Windows support to be good, i.e. no inst

Answer 1

EDIT: Perhaps add a "dvcs", "distrubutedversioncontrol", "distrubuted"

I've used Mercurial on Windows with no problems. You can use TortoiseHG or just use the command line. Mercurial does require Python, but that is easy to install in Windows as well.

Mercurial Binary Packages

Answer 2

There's a nice comparison between git, hg and bzr in this InfoQ article. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. You'll have to think about your project and your workflows and choose the best fit. The good news is that they're all fairly good.

Answer 3

I've had the best luck with Bazaar, followed by Mercurial. Never could get Git to work correctly. A quick search shows that Git still requires clunky emulation layers like Cygwin/MSYS, and I can't find any integration tools like TortoiseBzr for Git.

With Mercurial in Windows, I had several minor issues (insensitive paths, symlinks, ). They were usually fixed eventually, but I felt that the same quality of testing was not applied to running on Windows as for the other platforms. Bazaar also had better documentation for integrating with native applications like Visual C.

Answer 4

In my experience using GIT on windows is a major pain. But I have been using Fossil SCM for some time now, and I think it actually fits your needs exactly.

It also has a built in Ticket system and a Wiki. And the whole program is contained in 1 file and it works right out of the box.

I totally recommend it.

Here is a link to the site http://www.fossil-scm.org/

Remember, this site is self hosting, what that means is you are looking at the web interface to fossil it self, when you look at tickets and the wiki and documentation, you actually are using fossil.

But if your project has millions of lines of code and is a few gigabytes in size, you have to use GIT, there is no way around that problem.

Enjoy.

Answer 5

I agree with basszero. I'm using mercurial under windows and it's as easy and reliable as it can get. My development team is spread over Europe (well Dublin and Vienna :-). We use VPN to commit or sometime the built in webserver (hgserve). Both work fine with no problems out of the box.

Also diff3 open source tool works perfect with mercurial and TortoiseHG out of the box.

Answer 6

At last I checked, the only thing you need for Mercurial is Python and to grab a binary package. If you find yourself with more time and want to fiddle / build it yourself, look here.

The only real drawback with HG is its idea of branching .. but for some people that's a major plus.

I like it because its intuitive, easy to install and works on anything that Python does. I don't think that all of the available plugins will work for you, but most should.