[Techtalk] Version Control Systems

[Mary]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004, Jennifer Scalf wrote:
> Looked at Arch for a sec and I can't reminder why we didn't like it
> (again I didn't install...I've got way too many other projects right
> now..but I'm researching in the spare mins I have) I believe Arch was
> a bit too GNU software specific and for reasons that will go unnamed
> it will not be excepted here because of that.

My impression of Arch (and I do use it) is that it just doesn't have
enugh user recipes yet. They've provided every damn functionality under
the sun, but a new user has very little idea which of those they want.
Do they want the "CVS equivalents"? Do they want "CVS plus these
features"?

Their wiki is slowly evolving a lot of information about it, but my
experiences suggest that unless your organisation has someone in-house
already using arch then you're going to have a struggle working out
which parts of it you should use, which commands to execute when and the
like.

It really seems designed for the open source model -- ie tracking a
project's source for a long time with your own changes. Its improved
merging capabilities would be useful for a long term branch of an
in-house project too. But you would need to sell the learning curve to
people with some concrete demonstrations of its benefits for your
use-case I think. And that means having someone who can demonstrate
them.

-Mary