

Ask HN: What is the best version control software for lone web developers? - soundsop


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bayareaguy
I'd say Mercurial because

1\. in terms of design, performance and features it's about as good as git.
sure it may be missing this or that but see point 5 below.

2\. in terms of end-user complexity it's about as easy to use as svn (which
everybody knows)

3\. 99% of the code is in cleanly written Python and highly portable

4\. <http://bitbucket.org> is great and they offer SSL for free _private_
repositories (at github only paid plans offer SSL)

5\. it's easy to hack (provided you know Python)

I'll grant that the last point may not matter to the lone web developer but
personally I like things that make it easy for me to tinker with them when I
want or need to.

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patio11
The most important thing: ANY source control is better than NO source control.
It is 10,000 times more important that you pick one package, learn it, and USE
IT than you pick any particular package. (Source control isn't useful until
you've made it a routine part of the workflow.)

I use SVN, because that is what I got started on and that is what I know. It
works fine, for allowing me to go back to known-good versions of the code, and
for allowing stupidly easy Rails deployments through Capistrano. But really,
any of the alternatives are probably just as fine.

[Incidentally, my repositories sits on a machine that gets backed up daily.
That is, similarly, a good-enough-for-now solution. There are other
alternatives: use a dedicated provider, put it on a machine other than the
deployment machine, use distributed source control, whatever. Any of them
works as long as the answer is not "source control on the same machine you
spend most of your time on", and heck, that still captures a good deal of the
source control benefit, come to think of it.]

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tsally
So did you link it because of the interesting subject matter or the fact that
there is actually a serious discussion happening on reddit?

~~~
soundsop
To make sense of this question, you have to know that the original submission
linked to:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7tf8p/what_is_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7tf8p/what_is_the_best_version_control_software_for/)

I linked to the reddit discussion both because both the question the resulting
discussion on reddit was interesting.

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defunkt
Any DVCS.

    
    
      $ mkdir solo_project
      $ cd solo_project
      $ git init
    

Similar steps for hg and bzr.

------
johngunderman
I use SVN with the repository hosted on the same machine for all my lone
projects.

