Explosion of the VCS's

It used to be easy. There was RCS, and if it became complex, you had CVS. Officially, CVS means "Concurrent Version System", but in reality and for all practical purposes, its name is CVS. The server is called cvs, the client is called cvs (hey, they're the same program), and the traces it leaves behind in your working directory are called CVS, too. And the TCP port is cvspserver. Wow, wild; different name.

Well, almost.

Today, for some reason (no doubt all valid reasons, but that's not the point), there's a multitude of VCS's out there. There's subversion (which is really svn or WebDAV, depending on your point of view). There's arch (or is that tla?). There's darcs. And if Free Beer is good enough for you, there's BitKeeper.

Now, usually, I'd be the first one to love this; after all, more version control systems mean you have more choice, and choice is good. Unfortunately, that's not really true here. A VCS is not a MUA, a webbrowser, or an FTP client; with the latter three, I couldn't care less which one "everyone else" uses. With a VCS, though, I'll have to follow suit. If you pick darcs, and I want to cooperate, I had better picked darcs, too. If you pick arch, and I want to excel in helping you, I had better grok the tla concepts and command line.

That's not a problem if there's just one VCS. It becomes more of a problem if there's many of them. Don't get me wrong, I don't care learning; in fact, I love it. But there's a limit for everyone; mine is at the point where I say "wait a minute, I did this before, didn't I?"

Think I'll stick to CVS for the time being. I'll get back to this when "The World" has made a choice.