annotate en/intro.tex @ 218:75fd236d736b

History of SCM tools.

\chapter{Introduction}
\label{chap:intro}

\section{About revision control}

Revision control is the management of multiple versions of a piece of
information.  In its simplest form, it's a process that many people
perform by hand: every time you modify a file, save it under a new
name that contains a number, each one higher than the number of the
preceding version.

Manually managing multiple versions of even a single file is an
error-prone task, though, so software tools to help automate this
process have long been available.  The earliest automated revision
control tools were intended to help a single user to manage revisions
to a single file.  Over the past several decades, the scope of
revision control tools has expanded greatly; they now manage multiple
files, and help multiple people to work together.  The best modern
revision control tools will have no problem coping with thousands of
people working together on a single project, which might consist of
hundreds of thousands of files.

\subsection{Why use revision control?}

There are a number of reasons why you or your team might want to use
an automated revision control tool for a project.
\begin{itemize}
\item The software gives you a unified way of working with your
  project's files.
\item When you're working with other people, it makes it easier for
  you to collaborate.  For example, when people more or less
  simultaneously make potentially incompatible changes, the software
  will help you to identify and resolve those conflicts.
\item It will track the history of your project.  For every change,
  you'll have a log of \emph{who} made it; \emph{why} they made it;
  \emph{when} they made it; and \emph{what} the change was.
\item It can help you to recover from mistakes.  If you make a change
  that later turns out to be in error, you can revert to an earlier
  version of one or more files.  In fact, a \emph{really} good
  revision control tool will even help you to efficiently figure out
  exactly when a problem was introduced (see
  section~\ref{sec:undo:bisect} for details).
\item It will help you to work simultaneously on, and manage the drift
  between, multiple versions of your project.
\end{itemize}
Most of these reasons are equally valid---at least in theory---whether
you're working on a project by yourself, or with a hundred other
people.

A key question about the practicality of revision control at these two
different scales (``lone hacker'' and ``huge team'') is how its
\emph{benefits} compare to its \emph{costs}.  A revision control tool
that's difficult to understand or use is going to impose a high cost.

For example, a five-hundred-person project is likely to collapse under
its own weight almost immediately without a revision control tool and
process.  In this case, the cost of using revision control might
hardly seem worth considering, since \emph{without} it, failure is
almost guaranteed.

On the other hand, a one-person ``quick hack'' might seem like a poor
place to use a revision control tool, because surely the cost of using
one must be close to the overall cost of the project.  Right?

Mercurial uniquely supports \emph{both} of these scales of
development.  You can learn the basics in just a few minutes, and due
to its low overhead, you can apply revision control to the smallest of
projects with ease.  Its simplicity means you won't have a lot of
abstruse concepts or command sequences competing for mental space with
whatever you're \emph{really} trying to do.  At the same time,
Mercurial's high performance and peer-to-peer nature let you scale
painlessly to handle large projects.

\subsection{The many names of revision control}

Revision control is a diverse field, so much so that it doesn't
actually have a single name or acronym.  Here are a few of the more
common names and acronyms you'll encounter:
\begin{itemize}
\item Configuration management (CM)
\item Revision control (RCS)
\item Software configuration management (SCM)
\item Source code management
\item Source control
\item Version control (VCS)
\end{itemize}
Some people claim that these terms actually have different meanings,
but in practice they overlap so much that there's no agreed or even
useful way to tease them apart.

\section{A short history and hierarchy of revision control}

The best known of the old-time revision control tools is SCCS (Source
Code Control System), which Marc Rochkind wrote at Bell Labs, in the
early 1970s.  SCCS operated on individual files, and required every
person working on a project to have access to a shared workspace on a
single system.  Only one person could modify a file at any time;
arbitration for access to files was via locks.  It was common for
people to lock files, and later forget to unlock them, preventing
anyone else from modifying those files without the help of an
administrator.  

Walter Tichy developed a free alternative to SCCS in the early 1980s;
he called his program RCS (Revison Control System).  Like SCCS, RCS
required developers to work in a single shared workspace, and to lock
files to prevent multiple people from modifying them simultaneously.

Later in the 1980s, Dick Grune used RCS as a building block for a set
of shell scripts he initially called cmt, but then renamed to CVS
(Concurrent Versions System).  The big innovation of CVS was that it
let developers work simultaneously and somewhat independently in their
own personal workspaces.  The personal workspaces prevented developers
from stepping on each other's toes all the time, as was common with
SCCS and RCS.  Each developer had a copy of every project file, and
could modify their copies independently.  They had to merge their
edits prior to committing changes to the central repository.

Brian Berliner took Grune's original scripts and rewrote them in~C,
releasing in 1989 the code that has since developed into the modern
version of CVS.  CVS subsequently acquired the ability to operate over
a network connection, giving it a client/server architecture.  CVS's
architecture is centralised; only the server has a copy of the history
of the project.  Client workspaces just contain copies of recent
versions of the project's files, and a little metadata to tell them
where the server is.  CVS has been enormously successful; it is
probably the world's most widely used revision control system.

In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems developed an early distributed
revision control system, called TeamWare.  A TeamWare workspace
contains a complete copy of the project's history.  TeamWare has no
notion of a central repository.  (CVS relied upon RCS for its history
storage; TeamWare used SCCS.)

As the 1990s progressed, awareness grew of a number of problems with
CVS.  It records simultaneous changes to multiple files individually,
instead of grouping them together as a single logically atomic
operation.  It does not manage its file hierarchy well; it is easy to
make a mess of a repository by renaming files and directories.  Worse,
its source code is difficult to read and maintain, which made the
``pain level'' of fixing these architectural problems prohibitive.

In 2001, Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel, two developers who had worked on
CVS, started a project to replace it with a tool that would have a
better architecture and cleaner code.  The result, Subversion, does
not stray from CVS's centralised client/server model, but it adds
multi-file atomic commits, better namespace management, and a number
of other features that make it a generally better tool than CVS.
Since its initial release, it has rapidly grown in popularity.

More or less simultaneously, Graydon Hoare began working on an
ambitious distributed revision control system that he named Monotone.
While Monotone addresses many of CVS's design flaws and has a
peer-to-peer architecture, it goes beyond earlier (and subsequent)
revision control tools in a number of innovative ways.  It uses
cryptographic hashes as identifiers, and has an integral notion of
``trust'' for code from different sources.

Mercurial began life in 2005.  While a few aspects of its design are
influenced by Monotone, Mercurial focuses on ease of use, high
performance, and scalability to very large projects.

\subsection{On a single system}

\subsection{Network-based, but centralised}

\subsection{Fully distributed}


\section{Advantages of distributed revision control}

\subsection{For open source projects}

\subsection{For commercial projects}

\subsection{Myths about distributed revision control}

\section{Why choose Mercurial?}


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