view en/intro.tex @ 219:15a6fd2ba582

Start talking about the advantages of distributed tools.

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

\section{About revision control}

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.

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.

\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 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 \emph{who}
  made it; \emph{why} they made it; \emph{when} they made it; and
  \emph{what} the change was.
\item 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.
\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.

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.

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.

\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 Revision control (RCS)
\item Software configuration management (SCM), or configuration management
\item Source code management
\item Source code control, or 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 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.

\section{Trends in revision control}

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.

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.

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.

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.

\section{A few of the advantages of distributed revision control}

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ``core'' 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 ``read only'' 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.

\subsection{For open source projects}

\subsection{For commercial projects}

\subsection{Myths about distributed revision control}

\subsubsection{Distributed tools encourage projects to fork}

\section{Why choose Mercurial?}


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