Of version control and hostings

Recently I was just stumbling along in the internet when suddenly I came to the github.com page. I had no idea there was such a page. And on that page came the answer to one of the questions that have been bugging me in my head, "why is the Ruby on Rails guru Kamal giving a talk on using git at foss.my?". It is because RoR is hosted right there on github.com as the most watched project. So he's been using git quite extensively then. Hmmm.. an example of how which project you are most involved with will effect your choice of version control tool.

Some time ago I posted a few post on using mercurial and setting it up under lighttpd. Kaeru commented how he preferred bazaar over mercurial as his distributed version control of choice because launchpad.net uses bazaar and zope (which he is heavily involved in) is hosted on launchpad.net. Another example of how which project you are most involved with will effect your choice of version control tool.

As for me I still prefer mercurial over bazaar mainly because that's what I've been using first since Linus mentioned it in his google tech-talk on git. If it wasn't for because at that time there was a small possibility I might have to use windows so I preferred something written in python, I might have choosen git too. So I can't wait to hear Kamal's talk.

For most people they doesn't even use distributed version control but just version control in the form of subversion or even cvs. Of course the most famous hosting for this would be the venerable sourceforge.net. And so a lot of people would actually prefer subversion over git, mercurial or bazaar because their project of choice is hosted on sourceforge.net.

But I did try bazaar a bit after kaeru mentioned it and even registered a project on launchpad.net. Check out jocomgen if you are interested. It is a "Joomla Component Generator" for Joomla version 1.0. written in python and uses the mako template engine. It doesn't have any documention though but there is some example on how it could be used. And yes I do find it ironic that I'm using python to write php code. :P

Another project on launchpad.net is done by the lovely eavay called "Plone Speakers Product". Check out plspeakers. Basically it is a plone product which eavay created for use on the OSCC intranet to manage the information of speakers for myGOSSCON 2008.

And of course at OSCC we use subversion. MyMeeting is also hosted there. In the end "Choice is good (tm)".