It’s not all pretty flowers and frolicking deer for DVCS systems; there are a few areas where solutions from the CVCS world still win.
Before I begin, let me say a word about the freshness date of the material in this chapter. As I write this in mid-2011, the most popular tools in the DVCS world are Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. The issues mentioned here are common legitimate criticisms heard by CVCS users who are evaluating the decentralized model for version control. But things are moving very fast.
Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar all remain under active development by very smart people. New and improved versions are coming out regularly.
Relatively recent tools like Fossil[19] are bringing new ideas.
All the established CVCS leaders are searching for ways to morph their products into a DVCS, or least into some kind of hybrid. Nobody knows yet if or when one of these companies will find a sweet spot, a CVCS which brings just enough benefits from the DVCS architecture.
In the design and implementation of Veracity, some of the issues in this chapter have been particular areas of focus for us, areas where we want Veracity to go further than previously available solutions.
So the version control arena is in a sea of change right now, but I am confident of two things:
DVCS is the way of the future for version control. This model will become mainstream.
In the DVCS world, the current state of the art is just the beginning.