Version Control Blog

Ian Clatworthy, one of the primary developers of Bazaar, has posted a series of articles on version control in broad modern context.

His primary thesis is:

Beyond market acceptance, there are 6 main criteria I consider when evaluating collaboration tools:

1. Reliability
2. Adaptability
3. Usability
4. Extensibility
5. Integration
6. Administration (including Total Cost of Ownership)

Read the whole series at:

• “Version Control: The Future is Adaptive;
• “It Takes a Community to Raise Great Software”;
• “Wanted: Rock Solid Version Control”;
• “Version Control: Plug-ins vs Toolkits”;
• “Version Control: Design for Integration”;

Couple of memorable quotes:

Likewise, in the field of collaboration, I think there are 5 interesting numbers: 1, 2, 10, 100 and 1000. These numbers represent:

• an Individual
• a Partnership
• a Team
• a Company
• a Community

[...]

As a young software engineer back in the early 90s, 10s of thousands of people woke up to cold showers in Sydney one morning because of a corner-case bug in my code controlling the off peak hot water system. That sort of event tends to have a life long impact on how one designs software!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Bazaar/bzr, Ideas, Interoperability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.