Distributed version control

All unapproved Citizendium articles may contain errors of fact, bias, grammar etc. A version of an article is unapproved unless it is marked as citable with a dedicated green template at the top of the page, as in this version of the 'Biology' article. Citable articles are intended to be of reasonably high quality. The participants in the Citizendium project make no representations about the reliability of Citizendium articles or, generally, their suitability for any purpose. This article is currently being developed as part of an Eduzendium student project. The course homepage can be found at CZ:Special_Topics_2010. To provide students with experience in collaboration, you are warmly invited to join in here, or to leave comments on the discussion page. The anticipated date of course completion is 13 August 2010. One month after that date at the latest, this notice shall be removed. Besides, many other Citizendium articles welcome your collaboration!

Distributed version control systems such as Git and Mercurial have emerged in the last few years as a viable replacement for older centralized version control systems such as Subversion and Centralized Version Control (CVS). Git in particular has swept the open source community, becoming the revision control systems of some of the most important open source projects (e.g., the Linux kernel, Qt, Ruby on Rails).

Adoption

GitHub and BitBucket

GitHub.com was launched in 2008 as a hosting service for Git repositories. Improving upon many of the perceived flaws of older hosting services, GitHub has captured the vast majority of the Git hosting market share. GitHub's popularity has been partly responsible for the rising popularity of Git itself. BitBucket.org was also launched in 2008, offering a GitHub-like interface for Mercurial repositories. GitHub, BitBucket, and similar sites have swept the open source community, with many of the largest open source projects migrating to DVC and new DVC hosts simultaneously. Many of these new DVC hosts offer free public repositories for open source projects, charging only for private repositories.

Barriers to adoption

Support

Kiln

Auditing

git-svn

Platform support

Git can be run on Windows using Cygwin or msysgit.

Development tool integration

EGit is a pure Java implementation of Git supported by the Eclipse Foundation. TortoiseHG offers Windows Explorer integration for Mercurial.