The Best Sub Versioning for Linux

Sub versioning software makes it easy for software teams to work remotely.

When several developers are working on a single project, keeping track of their individual changes to, and separate versions of, the project's source code can prove challenging. To deal with these challenges, large software projects often use sub versioning software to track all these changes and contributions. There are numerous sub versioning programs for Linux, each with its own features that benefit different developers' preferences and projects.

Sub Versioning

Sub versioning software, also known as version control software, helps software development teams collaborate on projects by tracking and organizing the changes individual members make to source code files. Teams using this type of software have a main repository with a functional version of a project's source code, from which individual members can download copies. Team members then can make experimental changes to their copies of the source code and wait until those changes are fully functional before committing them to the main repository.

SVN

One piece of popular sub versioning software for Linux is called Subversion (SVN). SVN uses a centralized repository, where one server holds the record of every version of the source code team members submitted. Team members can download, or "check out," the latest version of the project's source code, as well as any previous version team members committed to the repository, from this centralized repository. SVN can also list the differences between two versions of the same source code.

Mercurial

Mercurial is sub versioning software that uses a distributed system instead of SVN's centralized system. Team members on a project use mercurial copy, or "clone," an entire copy of the project's repository to their computers instead of individual files. This gives anyone who clones the mercurial repository access to every iteration of the project's source code on his own machine. Mercurial tracks changes and source code commits with a minimum number of commands, which makes it easier to learn to use than SVN.

Git

Git is another popular piece of sub versioning software for Linux. It was developed by Linus Torvalds, who also created the Linux kernel, as distributed version control software. Every team member has a full copy of the project's repository, but Git includes more commands and features than Mercurial. Git is also popular among developers who perform work on the Linux kernel, since they must learn Git in order to make contributions to the kernel project.

References

• Apache: Subversion
• Mercurial: Learning Mercurial in Workflows
• Git: Documentation