diff en/ch00-preface.xml @ 682:28b5a5befb08

Fold preface and intro into one

--- a/en/ch00-preface.xml	Wed Mar 18 00:08:22 2009 -0700
+++ b/en/ch00-preface.xml	Thu Mar 19 20:54:12 2009 -0700
@@ -3,23 +3,139 @@
 <preface id="chap:preface">
   <title>Preface</title>
 
-  <para>Distributed revision control is a relatively new territory,
-    and has thus far grown due to people's willingness to strike out
-    into ill-charted territory.</para>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Why revision control? Why Mercurial?</title>
+
+    <para>Revision control is the process of managing multiple
+      versions of a piece of information.  In its simplest form, this
+      is something that many people do 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.</para>
+
+    <para>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 of a single file.  Over the past few 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 have no
+      problem coping with thousands of people working together on
+      projects that consist of hundreds of thousands of files.</para>
+
+    <para>The arrival of distributed revision control is relatively
+      recent, and so far this new field has grown due to people's
+      willingness to explore ill-charted territory.</para>
+
+    <para>I am writing a book about distributed revision control
+      because I believe that it is an important subject that deserves
+      a field guide. I chose to write about Mercurial because it is
+      the easiest tool to learn the terrain with, and yet it scales to
+      the demands of real, challenging environments where many other
+      revision control tools buckle.</para>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Why use revision control?</title>
+
+      <para>There are a number of reasons why you or your team might
+	want to use an automated revision control tool for a
+	project.</para>
 
-  <para>I am writing a book about distributed revision control because
-    I believe that it is an important subject that deserves a field
-    guide. I chose to write about Mercurial because it is the easiest
-    tool to learn the terrain with, and yet it scales to the demands
-    of real, challenging environments where many other revision
-    control tools fail.</para>
+      <itemizedlist>
+	<listitem><para>It will track the history and evolution of
+	    your project, so you don't have to.  For every change,
+	    you'll have a log of <emphasis>who</emphasis> made it;
+	    <emphasis>why</emphasis> they made it;
+	    <emphasis>when</emphasis> they made it; and
+	    <emphasis>what</emphasis> the change
+	    was.</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>When you're working with other people,
+	    revision control software 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.</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>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 <emphasis>really</emphasis> good revision control
+	    tool will even help you to efficiently figure out exactly
+	    when a problem was introduced (see section <xref
+	      linkend="sec:undo:bisect"/> for details).</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>It will help you to work simultaneously on,
+	    and manage the drift between, multiple versions of your
+	    project.</para></listitem>
+      </itemizedlist>
+
+      <para>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.</para>
+
+      <para>A key question about the practicality of revision control
+	at these two different scales (<quote>lone hacker</quote> and
+	<quote>huge team</quote>) is how its
+	<emphasis>benefits</emphasis> compare to its
+	<emphasis>costs</emphasis>.  A revision control tool that's
+	difficult to understand or use is going to impose a high
+	cost.</para>
+
+      <para>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
+	<emphasis>without</emphasis> it, failure is almost
+	guaranteed.</para>
+
+      <para>On the other hand, a one-person <quote>quick hack</quote>
+	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?</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial uniquely supports <emphasis>both</emphasis> 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 <emphasis>really</emphasis> trying to do.  At the same
+	time, Mercurial's high performance and peer-to-peer nature let
+	you scale painlessly to handle large projects.</para>
+
+      <para>No revision control tool can rescue a poorly run project,
+	but a good choice of tools can make a huge difference to the
+	fluidity with which you can work on a project.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>The many names of revision control</title>
+
+      <para>Revision control is a diverse field, so much so that it is
+	referred to by many names and acronyms.  Here are a few of the
+	more common variations you'll encounter:</para>
+      <itemizedlist>
+	<listitem><para>Revision control (RCS)</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>Software configuration management (SCM), or
+	    configuration management</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>Source code management</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>Source code control, or source
+	    control</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para>Version control
+	    (VCS)</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+      <para>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.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
 
   <sect1>
     <title>This book is a work in progress</title>
 
     <para>I am releasing this book while I am still writing it, in the
-      hope that it will prove useful to others.  I also hope that
-      readers will contribute as they see fit.</para>
+      hope that it will prove useful to others.  I am writing under an
+      open license in the hope that you, my readers, will contribute
+      feedback and perhaps content of your own.</para>
 
   </sect1>
   <sect1>
@@ -59,8 +175,567 @@
       seeing is consistent and reproducible.</para>
 
   </sect1>
+
   <sect1>
-    <title>Colophon---this book is Free</title>
+    <title>Trends in the field</title>
+
+    <para>There has been an unmistakable trend in the development and
+      use of revision control tools over the past four decades, as
+      people have become familiar with the capabilities of their tools
+      and constrained by their limitations.</para>
+
+    <para>The first generation began by managing single files on
+      individual computers.  Although these tools represented a huge
+      advance over ad-hoc manual revision control, their locking model
+      and reliance on a single computer limited them to small,
+      tightly-knit teams.</para>
+
+    <para>The second generation loosened these constraints by moving
+      to network-centered architectures, and managing entire projects
+      at a time.  As projects grew larger, they ran into new problems.
+      With clients needing to talk to servers very frequently, server
+      scaling became an issue for large projects.  An unreliable
+      network connection could prevent remote users from being able to
+      talk to the server at all.  As open source projects started
+      making read-only access available anonymously to anyone, people
+      without commit privileges found that they could not use the
+      tools to interact with a project in a natural way, as they could
+      not record their changes.</para>
+
+    <para>The current generation of revision control tools is
+      peer-to-peer in nature.  All of these systems have dropped the
+      dependency on a single central server, and allow people to
+      distribute their revision control data to where it's actually
+      needed.  Collaboration over the Internet has moved from
+      constrained by technology to a matter of choice and consensus.
+      Modern tools can operate offline indefinitely and autonomously,
+      with a network connection only needed when syncing changes with
+      another repository.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>A few of the advantages of distributed revision
+      control</title>
+
+    <para>Even though distributed revision control tools have for
+      several years been as robust and usable as their
+      previous-generation counterparts, people using older tools have
+      not yet necessarily woken up to their advantages.  There are a
+      number of ways in which distributed tools shine relative to
+      centralised ones.</para>
+
+    <para>For an individual developer, distributed tools are almost
+      always much faster than centralised tools.  This is for a simple
+      reason: a centralised tool needs to talk over the network for
+      many common operations, because most metadata is stored in a
+      single copy on the central server.  A distributed tool stores
+      all of its metadata locally.  All else being equal, talking over
+      the network adds overhead to a centralised tool.  Don't
+      underestimate the value of a snappy, responsive tool: you're
+      going to spend a lot of time interacting with your revision
+      control software.</para>
+
+    <para>Distributed tools are indifferent to the vagaries of your
+      server infrastructure, again because they replicate metadata to
+      so many locations.  If you use a centralised system and your
+      server catches fire, you'd better hope that your backup media
+      are reliable, and that your last backup was recent and actually
+      worked.  With a distributed tool, you have many backups
+      available on every contributor's computer.</para>
+
+    <para>The reliability of your network will affect distributed
+      tools far less than it will centralised tools.  You can't even
+      use a centralised tool without a network connection, except for
+      a few highly constrained commands.  With a distributed tool, if
+      your network connection goes down while you're working, you may
+      not even notice.  The only thing you won't be able to do is talk
+      to repositories on other computers, something that is relatively
+      rare compared with local operations.  If you have a far-flung
+      team of collaborators, this may be significant.</para>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Advantages for open source projects</title>
+
+      <para>If you take a shine to an open source project and decide
+	that you would like to start hacking on it, and that project
+	uses a distributed revision control tool, you are at once a
+	peer with the people who consider themselves the
+	<quote>core</quote> of that project.  If they publish their
+	repositories, you can immediately copy their project history,
+	start making changes, and record your work, using the same
+	tools in the same ways as insiders.  By contrast, with a
+	centralised tool, you must use the software in a <quote>read
+	  only</quote> mode unless someone grants you permission to
+	commit changes to their central server.  Until then, you won't
+	be able to record changes, and your local modifications will
+	be at risk of corruption any time you try to update your
+	client's view of the repository.</para>
+
+      <sect3>
+	<title>The forking non-problem</title>
+
+	<para>It has been suggested that distributed revision control
+	  tools pose some sort of risk to open source projects because
+	  they make it easy to <quote>fork</quote> the development of
+	  a project.  A fork happens when there are differences in
+	  opinion or attitude between groups of developers that cause
+	  them to decide that they can't work together any longer.
+	  Each side takes a more or less complete copy of the
+	  project's source code, and goes off in its own
+	  direction.</para>
+
+	<para>Sometimes the camps in a fork decide to reconcile their
+	  differences. With a centralised revision control system, the
+	  <emphasis>technical</emphasis> process of reconciliation is
+	  painful, and has to be performed largely by hand.  You have
+	  to decide whose revision history is going to
+	  <quote>win</quote>, and graft the other team's changes into
+	  the tree somehow. This usually loses some or all of one
+	  side's revision history.</para>
+
+	<para>What distributed tools do with respect to forking is
+	  they make forking the <emphasis>only</emphasis> way to
+	  develop a project.  Every single change that you make is
+	  potentially a fork point.  The great strength of this
+	  approach is that a distributed revision control tool has to
+	  be really good at <emphasis>merging</emphasis> forks,
+	  because forks are absolutely fundamental: they happen all
+	  the time.</para>
+
+	<para>If every piece of work that everybody does, all the
+	  time, is framed in terms of forking and merging, then what
+	  the open source world refers to as a <quote>fork</quote>
+	  becomes <emphasis>purely</emphasis> a social issue.  If
+	  anything, distributed tools <emphasis>lower</emphasis> the
+	  likelihood of a fork:</para>
+	<itemizedlist>
+	  <listitem><para>They eliminate the social distinction that
+	      centralised tools impose: that between insiders (people
+	      with commit access) and outsiders (people
+	      without).</para></listitem>
+	  <listitem><para>They make it easier to reconcile after a
+	      social fork, because all that's involved from the
+	      perspective of the revision control software is just
+	      another merge.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+	<para>Some people resist distributed tools because they want
+	  to retain tight control over their projects, and they
+	  believe that centralised tools give them this control.
+	  However, if you're of this belief, and you publish your CVS
+	  or Subversion repositories publicly, there are plenty of
+	  tools available that can pull out your entire project's
+	  history (albeit slowly) and recreate it somewhere that you
+	  don't control.  So while your control in this case is
+	  illusory, you are forgoing the ability to fluidly
+	  collaborate with whatever people feel compelled to mirror
+	  and fork your history.</para>
+
+      </sect3>
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Advantages for commercial projects</title>
+
+      <para>Many commercial projects are undertaken by teams that are
+	scattered across the globe.  Contributors who are far from a
+	central server will see slower command execution and perhaps
+	less reliability.  Commercial revision control systems attempt
+	to ameliorate these problems with remote-site replication
+	add-ons that are typically expensive to buy and cantankerous
+	to administer.  A distributed system doesn't suffer from these
+	problems in the first place.  Better yet, you can easily set
+	up multiple authoritative servers, say one per site, so that
+	there's no redundant communication between repositories over
+	expensive long-haul network links.</para>
+
+      <para>Centralised revision control systems tend to have
+	relatively low scalability.  It's not unusual for an expensive
+	centralised system to fall over under the combined load of
+	just a few dozen concurrent users.  Once again, the typical
+	response tends to be an expensive and clunky replication
+	facility.  Since the load on a central server---if you have
+	one at all---is many times lower with a distributed tool
+	(because all of the data is replicated everywhere), a single
+	cheap server can handle the needs of a much larger team, and
+	replication to balance load becomes a simple matter of
+	scripting.</para>
+
+      <para>If you have an employee in the field, troubleshooting a
+	problem at a customer's site, they'll benefit from distributed
+	revision control. The tool will let them generate custom
+	builds, try different fixes in isolation from each other, and
+	search efficiently through history for the sources of bugs and
+	regressions in the customer's environment, all without needing
+	to connect to your company's network.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Why choose Mercurial?</title>
+
+    <para>Mercurial has a unique set of properties that make it a
+      particularly good choice as a revision control system.</para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem><para>It is easy to learn and use.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>It is lightweight.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>It scales excellently.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>It is easy to
+	  customise.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+    <para>If you are at all familiar with revision control systems,
+      you should be able to get up and running with Mercurial in less
+      than five minutes.  Even if not, it will take no more than a few
+      minutes longer.  Mercurial's command and feature sets are
+      generally uniform and consistent, so you can keep track of a few
+      general rules instead of a host of exceptions.</para>
+
+    <para>On a small project, you can start working with Mercurial in
+      moments. Creating new changes and branches; transferring changes
+      around (whether locally or over a network); and history and
+      status operations are all fast.  Mercurial attempts to stay
+      nimble and largely out of your way by combining low cognitive
+      overhead with blazingly fast operations.</para>
+
+    <para>The usefulness of Mercurial is not limited to small
+      projects: it is used by projects with hundreds to thousands of
+      contributors, each containing tens of thousands of files and
+      hundreds of megabytes of source code.</para>
+
+    <para>If the core functionality of Mercurial is not enough for
+      you, it's easy to build on.  Mercurial is well suited to
+      scripting tasks, and its clean internals and implementation in
+      Python make it easy to add features in the form of extensions.
+      There are a number of popular and useful extensions already
+      available, ranging from helping to identify bugs to improving
+      performance.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Mercurial compared with other tools</title>
+
+    <para>Before you read on, please understand that this section
+      necessarily reflects my own experiences, interests, and (dare I
+      say it) biases.  I have used every one of the revision control
+      tools listed below, in most cases for several years at a
+      time.</para>
+
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Subversion</title>
+
+      <para>Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed
+	to replace CVS.  It has a centralised client/server
+	architecture.</para>
+
+      <para>Subversion and Mercurial have similarly named commands for
+	performing the same operations, so if you're familiar with
+	one, it is easy to learn to use the other.  Both tools are
+	portable to all popular operating systems.</para>
+
+      <para>Prior to version 1.5, Subversion had no useful support for
+	merges. At the time of writing, its merge tracking capability
+	is new, and known to be <ulink
+	  url="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.finalword">complicated 
+	  and buggy</ulink>.</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial has a substantial performance advantage over
+	Subversion on every revision control operation I have
+	benchmarked.  I have measured its advantage as ranging from a
+	factor of two to a factor of six when compared with Subversion
+	1.4.3's <emphasis>ra_local</emphasis> file store, which is the
+	fastest access method available.  In more realistic
+	deployments involving a network-based store, Subversion will
+	be at a substantially larger disadvantage.  Because many
+	Subversion commands must talk to the server and Subversion
+	does not have useful replication facilities, server capacity
+	and network bandwidth become bottlenecks for modestly large
+	projects.</para>
+
+      <para>Additionally, Subversion incurs substantial storage
+	overhead to avoid network transactions for a few common
+	operations, such as finding modified files
+	(<literal>status</literal>) and displaying modifications
+	against the current revision (<literal>diff</literal>).  As a
+	result, a Subversion working copy is often the same size as,
+	or larger than, a Mercurial repository and working directory,
+	even though the Mercurial repository contains a complete
+	history of the project.</para>
+
+      <para>Subversion is widely supported by third party tools.
+	Mercurial currently lags considerably in this area.  This gap
+	is closing, however, and indeed some of Mercurial's GUI tools
+	now outshine their Subversion equivalents.  Like Mercurial,
+	Subversion has an excellent user manual.</para>
+
+      <para>Because Subversion doesn't store revision history on the
+	client, it is well suited to managing projects that deal with
+	lots of large, opaque binary files.  If you check in fifty
+	revisions to an incompressible 10MB file, Subversion's
+	client-side space usage stays constant The space used by any
+	distributed SCM will grow rapidly in proportion to the number
+	of revisions, because the differences between each revision
+	are large.</para>
+
+      <para>In addition, it's often difficult or, more usually,
+	impossible to merge different versions of a binary file.
+	Subversion's ability to let a user lock a file, so that they
+	temporarily have the exclusive right to commit changes to it,
+	can be a significant advantage to a project where binary files
+	are widely used.</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a Subversion
+	repository. It can also export revision history to a
+	Subversion repository.  This makes it easy to <quote>test the
+	  waters</quote> and use Mercurial and Subversion in parallel
+	before deciding to switch.  History conversion is incremental,
+	so you can perform an initial conversion, then small
+	additional conversions afterwards to bring in new
+	changes.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Git</title>
+
+      <para>Git is a distributed revision control tool that was
+	developed for managing the Linux kernel source tree.  Like
+	Mercurial, its early design was somewhat influenced by
+	Monotone.</para>
+
+      <para>Git has a very large command set, with version 1.5.0
+	providing 139 individual commands.  It has something of a
+	reputation for being difficult to learn.  Compared to Git,
+	Mercurial has a strong focus on simplicity.</para>
+
+      <para>In terms of performance, Git is extremely fast.  In
+	several cases, it is faster than Mercurial, at least on Linux,
+	while Mercurial performs better on other operations.  However,
+	on Windows, the performance and general level of support that
+	Git provides is, at the time of writing, far behind that of
+	Mercurial.</para>
+
+      <para>While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git
+	repository requires frequent manual <quote>repacks</quote> of
+	its metadata.  Without these, performance degrades, while
+	space usage grows rapidly.  A server that contains many Git
+	repositories that are not rigorously and frequently repacked
+	will become heavily disk-bound during backups, and there have
+	been instances of daily backups taking far longer than 24
+	hours as a result.  A freshly packed Git repository is
+	slightly smaller than a Mercurial repository, but an unpacked
+	repository is several orders of magnitude larger.</para>
+
+      <para>The core of Git is written in C.  Many Git commands are
+	implemented as shell or Perl scripts, and the quality of these
+	scripts varies widely. I have encountered several instances
+	where scripts charged along blindly in the presence of errors
+	that should have been fatal.</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a Git
+	repository.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>CVS</title>
+
+      <para>CVS is probably the most widely used revision control tool
+	in the world.  Due to its age and internal untidiness, it has
+	been only lightly maintained for many years.</para>
+
+      <para>It has a centralised client/server architecture.  It does
+	not group related file changes into atomic commits, making it
+	easy for people to <quote>break the build</quote>: one person
+	can successfully commit part of a change and then be blocked
+	by the need for a merge, causing other people to see only a
+	portion of the work they intended to do.  This also affects
+	how you work with project history.  If you want to see all of
+	the modifications someone made as part of a task, you will
+	need to manually inspect the descriptions and timestamps of
+	the changes made to each file involved (if you even know what
+	those files were).</para>
+
+      <para>CVS has a muddled notion of tags and branches that I will
+	not attempt to even describe.  It does not support renaming of
+	files or directories well, making it easy to corrupt a
+	repository.  It has almost no internal consistency checking
+	capabilities, so it is usually not even possible to tell
+	whether or how a repository is corrupt.  I would not recommend
+	CVS for any project, existing or new.</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial can import CVS revision history.  However, there
+	are a few caveats that apply; these are true of every other
+	revision control tool's CVS importer, too.  Due to CVS's lack
+	of atomic changes and unversioned filesystem hierarchy, it is
+	not possible to reconstruct CVS history completely accurately;
+	some guesswork is involved, and renames will usually not show
+	up.  Because a lot of advanced CVS administration has to be
+	done by hand and is hence error-prone, it's common for CVS
+	importers to run into multiple problems with corrupted
+	repositories (completely bogus revision timestamps and files
+	that have remained locked for over a decade are just two of
+	the less interesting problems I can recall from personal
+	experience).</para>
+
+      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a CVS
+	repository.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Commercial tools</title>
+
+      <para>Perforce has a centralised client/server architecture,
+	with no client-side caching of any data.  Unlike modern
+	revision control tools, Perforce requires that a user run a
+	command to inform the server about every file they intend to
+	edit.</para>
+
+      <para>The performance of Perforce is quite good for small teams,
+	but it falls off rapidly as the number of users grows beyond a
+	few dozen. Modestly large Perforce installations require the
+	deployment of proxies to cope with the load their users
+	generate.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Choosing a revision control tool</title>
+
+      <para>With the exception of CVS, all of the tools listed above
+	have unique strengths that suit them to particular styles of
+	work.  There is no single revision control tool that is best
+	in all situations.</para>
+
+      <para>As an example, Subversion is a good choice for working
+	with frequently edited binary files, due to its centralised
+	nature and support for file locking.</para>
+
+      <para>I personally find Mercurial's properties of simplicity,
+	performance, and good merge support to be a compelling
+	combination that has served me well for several years.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Switching from another tool to Mercurial</title>
+
+    <para>Mercurial is bundled with an extension named <literal
+	role="hg-ext">convert</literal>, which can incrementally
+      import revision history from several other revision control
+      tools.  By <quote>incremental</quote>, I mean that you can
+      convert all of a project's history to date in one go, then rerun
+      the conversion later to obtain new changes that happened after
+      the initial conversion.</para>
+
+    <para>The revision control tools supported by <literal
+	role="hg-ext">convert</literal> are as follows:</para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem><para>Subversion</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>CVS</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>Git</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para>Darcs</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+    <para>In addition, <literal role="hg-ext">convert</literal> can
+      export changes from Mercurial to Subversion.  This makes it
+      possible to try Subversion and Mercurial in parallel before
+      committing to a switchover, without risking the loss of any
+      work.</para>
+
+    <para>The <command role="hg-ext-convert">convert</command> command
+      is easy to use.  Simply point it at the path or URL of the
+      source repository, optionally give it the name of the
+      destination repository, and it will start working.  After the
+      initial conversion, just run the same command again to import
+      new changes.</para>
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+    <title>A short history of revision control</title>
+
+    <para>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.</para>
+
+    <para>Walter Tichy developed a free alternative to SCCS in the
+      early 1980s; he called his program RCS (Revision 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.</para>
+
+    <para>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.</para>
+
+    <para>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.</para>
+
+    <para>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.)</para>
+
+    <para>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 <quote>pain
+	level</quote> of fixing these architectural problems
+      prohibitive.</para>
+
+    <para>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.</para>
+
+    <para>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 <quote>trust</quote> for code from different
+      sources.</para>
+
+    <para>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.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Colophon&emdash;this book is Free</title>
 
     <para>This book is licensed under the Open Publication License,
       and is produced entirely using Free Software tools.  It is