Research Data Management: Version Control Version Control Open source software comparison table

Software Technical Website Description Platform Expertise Required

Git http://git-scm.com/ No Programming “A Git repository is a database “Git is a distributed revision control tool that was developed GUI available containing all the information for managing the Linux kernel source tree. Like Mercurial, its needed to retain and manage early design was somewhat influenced by Monotone. the revisions and history of a Git is extremely fast. However, on Windows, the project. In Git, as with most performance and general level of support that Git provides version control systems, a is, at the time of writing, far behind that of Mercurial. repository retains a complete While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git copy of the entire project repository requires frequent manual “repacks” of its throughout its lifetime. metadata. However, unlike most other Without these, performance degrades, while space usage Linux, BSD, Sol VCSs, the Git repository not grows rapidly. A server that contains many Git repositories only provides a complete that are not rigorously and frequently repacked will become working copy of all the files in heavily disk-bound during backups, and there have been the repository, but also a copy instances of daily backups taking far longer than 24 hours as of the repository itself with a result. A freshly packed Git repository is slightly smaller which to work.” than a Mercurial repository, but an unpacked repository is several orders of magnitude larger. The core of Git is written in C. Many Git commands are implemented as shell or Perl scripts.”

Mercurial (Hg) No Programming Microsoft http://mercurial.selenic.co (implemented in Windows, m Python) GNU/Linux, GUI: GUI available for Mac OS X, http://tortoisehg.bitbucket Windows: Sun/Oracle .org/ TortoiseHg integrates Solaris 11 “Subversion and Mercurial Mercurial directly Express have similarly named into your explorer. commands for performing Focus on simplicity the same operations, so if for user. you’re familiar with one, it is easy to learn to use the other. Both tools are

Software Technical Website Description Platform Expertise Required

portable to all popular operating systems.” “Mercurial can import revision history from a Git repository.” SVN - No Programming Unix, Win32, http://subversion.apache.o “Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed to replace CVS. It has centralized client/server architecture.” Subversion GUI not found BeOS, OS/2, rg MacOS X

GNU RCS No Programming UNIX, http://www.gnu.org/softw Manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/manual/rcs.html RCS is GUI not found Windows, DOS are/rcs/ useful for text that is revised frequently, including source code, The Revision Control programs, documentation, graphics, papers, and form letters System (RCS) manages multiple revisions of files. RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions.