One of my aims with this site is to record some details about how I go along the process of creating applications or websites. So I am going to describe some of my decisions and thoughts along the way.

Something that I need to pick quite soon is a version control system. I think I have got it down but I am going to put here a few of my reasons why. For a long time I had been using Subversion ( http://subversion.tigris.org/ ) and that does work well. But the newer distributed systems are becoming popular and from what I can see have quite a few advantages over SVN. I'm not going to debate that fully, there are plenty of other websites out there that already do that, a quick google search "central vs distributed version control" shows up quite a lot, heres the first few:

http://blog.ianbicking.org/distributed-vs-centralized-scm.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111031/comparison-between-centralized...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control#Distributed_vs...

So my choice, at the moment I have got it down to either Bazaar ( http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/ ) or Mercurial ( http://mercurial.selenic.com/ ). And I think I have already decided on Mercurial as I found it easier to use. Besides the version control system itself another issue is source hosting. I want to share everything that I code, I can't really see it being better than anything out there already, but if it can help or interest just one person then I think it's worth putting out there :).

Currently my choice for source hosting is likely to go with Bitbucket ( https://bitbucket.org/ ) since I want to go with Mercurial. One issue I have been thinking about with the hosting site is planning of my software. I know there are no end to the different ways that you can design and plan software, but for this work I am probably going to keep it quite simple to start with.

I had looked at the Bazaar hosting that is popular, Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ). That has a system called blueprints that sounds quite good and it integrates a translation system if your application becomes very popular. The reason I am going to try Bitbucket first is that it has far better support for Windows and that is going to be my first main platform since it's far easier to get started with.

P.S. I actually managed to get another post done :), this year is going to be the time I get this website working. I'm sure my writing style will improve as I write more posts as well.

Tags: Software Development