I’ve had my share of bad luck the last week. Servers dying, Internet connections going down and all sort of annoying technical issues you rather not want to work on while having deadlines. During this I noticed that using Subversion as a tool for version control and in my case general asset management for projects kinda sucks. If you don’t have a connection or the server goes down, you cannot use the repository in a structured manner. So I’m going to leave the centralised server repository for version control behind and start using distributed version control. I’ll still use a central server for backup and easy access for clients and collaborators, but I will not be dependent on it anymore.

Since its kinda hard to know which of the myriad of distributed revision control systems (DVCS) complies with my demands I’ll start using some of the ones that looked most promising.  The features I’m looking for are:

• can handle binary files efficiently (I need images and other binary files in a repository as well)
• is cross-platform (I do not want to be tied to one platform, nor do I want to force other to use my preferred platform)
• ease of use (yep that’s a feature in my book)
• tools (it needs to be extensible preferable in a language I already know)
• documentation (also a feature in my opinion)
• off-line usage is just as good as on-line usage
• has community and support options available

I’ll be checking out Mercurial (I hope to contribute to this project for my Neuro OSD and learn a bit of Lua), Bazaar (also checking it out with a small project) and maybe I should have a look at Git.

Off course, the DVCS of my chosing needs to be FLOSS.

Any hints and tips are appreciated!