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I confess that I used to use RCS, which was the most infamous version control system (VCS).

Once you start using RCS, you must “check out” your code or document and it is locked until you “check in” it. Checking in/out is not very harmful, but the locking causes serious disaster. Once someone, possibly alias of you, locked the code by checking out it, there is no way for other guys, possibly another alias of you, to edit it.

RCS’s successors CVS and SVN are a little bit better than RCS —- and I had used them for many years. They don’t lock anything. You even don’t have to check out your code; you can edit the code anytime you want, and then just “commit” the change. If the commit doesn’t conflict other guy’s change to the same code, it is accepted.

The biggest weak point of CVS and SVN is that you cannot commit your change while you are off line —- of course you can set up CVS or SVN at your local host, however, you cannot have the repository (central database of CVS or SVN) at both your local host AND at outside server simultaneously.

By distributed version control system (DVCS), including git and hg, you can have your local database (repository) and global database at your option. Your local repository and the global repository are equal, there is no priority among repositories. You can “push” and “pull” changes to/from other repositories. This is the new world that you cannot forget and leave.

And, we reach the titled question: which DVCS?

I’m using two very popular DVCSs, git and hg (Mercurial). Git is used in Linux kernel project, and hg is used in Mozilla project; this means there is no significant difference between them, and my personal impression is the same.

However, I can say that the hg is more stylish and more fashionable than the git due to its basic architecture. (And more, hg is easier to type than git on QWERTY or DVORAK keyboard.) Thus I prefer hg especially when I use DVCS on command line.

【抄訳】gitよりhg使ってるほうがモテると思うよ．