Bazaar

[chombee]

Has anyone considered bazaar for homedir versioning?

It seems like it would be pretty good, perhaps better than git, though
I'm not sure yet what gotchas there might be, or how it would deal with
the odd requirements like large binary files, keeping track of file
metadata, etc.

This guy was sort of doing it (syncing and versioning config files with
a bzr repo in his homedir):

http://albatross.dnsdojo.net/apache2-default/wiki/index.php/Bazaar

but it's just for a few config files, and it's quite an old article,
from when bzr was fairly new.

I think bzr might have some advantages over git for this. It's from
Bazaar's own website, but:

http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsGit

* The main thing for me: it has a cleaner command set. Makes it much
harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Commands just work like you expect
them to, a nice clean UI model was a goal from the start, not an
afterthought like with git. There's good documentation too. Generally,
designed for everyone, instead of designed for the linux kernel team.

* A remote repo can be just a directory accessible via SSH or FTP, you
don't need a bzr instance on the remote server.

* bzr recognises files and directories, you can commit an empty file or
directory, commit a rename of a file or directory.

* More direct support for the centralised server workflow. You can
commit directly to a centralised server instead of committing and then
pushing. Not sure how much I'd want that. You can also do local commits.

* "supports SVN-style checkout, whereas in Git you may have to download
whole — possibly big — repository", I think this means you can checkout
just a given file or directory from a repo.

* I think it might track file permissions: "Security can be applied to
different branches by using existing operating system access control
facilities."

* Don't need to periodically pack repositories yourself.

* It has a Python plugin API, might be useful

They also claim it's up to par with git on speed, storage space and
cryptographic content validation.