Something like 10 years ago, when I started seriously working on the SENG code that is behind my Merry Prankster RPG games (still going!), I needed a source control system for the code. At the time, Subversion ( https://subversion.apache.org/ ) was the safe, standard open-source SCS. However, I wanted to try out the new distributed source control that was just coming into fashion. At the time, Git ( https://git-scm.com/ ) was the leading SCS, mainly because it was used for the Linux kernel, but Mercurial ( https://www.mercurial-scm.org/ ) was also popular, and reputed to have better Windows support, so I went with that.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been using SCS as a single-user, but with multiple instances, for example one on Windows for building Windows apps, and another on Mac for building iOS and MacOS apps. The benefits of SCS are source code history (which I can’t live without anymore), and easy sharing of code between those multiple instances. For backing up source code, I just zip up the whole source tree once a week and put it somewhere safe.
Recently, since cloud hosting of source code has become inexpensive (free) and reliable, I’ve wanted to move over to that. When I started looking into that, I realized that Mercurial has sunk to a very low percentage of the open-source SCS market, and Git has basically triumphed. So, I made the call to move over to Git, with GitHub ( https://github.com/ ).
I’ve just made the transition. I’m using GitHub Desktop as a UI, and haven’t had to go to the command line at all to use Git yet. Honestly, I am not really used to that yet, but I’m not going to use the command line (and create extra stuff to learn) for no good reason. Otherwise, I’m very happy with things thus far, and appreciate that I now have a cloud backup automatically for my source code. I do miss Mercurial a little bit, just from a nostalgia/plucky-underdog point of view.
