brainstorms

Tuesday June 21, 2005

revision control, or the tyranny of adequacy

my good friend david tilbrook once coined the term tyranny of adequacy to describe the continued domination of make and make-like (eg. gmake, jam, cake, ant, ad nauseam) tools for product builds and release engineering. i think the term is now applicable to many other areas of software development, such as revision control. according to the (selection-biased) poll shown at kerneltrap, the most popular [foss] source-code control system appears to be subversion, essentially an adequate next-generation cvs. familiarity breeds no innovation; less familiar but interesting and powerful systems [some, like tom lord's gnu arch, are very idiosyncratic] get fewer users.

i would like to see a poll that covers the entire industry, instead of just the readers of kerneltrap.

reading: david wheeler has a very good overview of the systems shown on this chart.

[note: the graph on the right came out of staroffice. it is adequate for the job, but not more. i am in general not happy with most graphing tools i have found. that will require another blog entry...]