Best source control system for maintaining different versions [closed]

Question

We need to be able to simultanously maintain a set of different versions of our system. I assume this is best done using branching. We currently use TFS2008 for source control, work items and automatic builds.

What is the best version control solution for this task? Our organization is in the process of merging to TFS2010. Will TFS2010 give us the functionality we need to easily manage a series of branches per system version? We need to be able to keep each version isolated from the others, so that we can do testing and deployment for each version.

Our dev team consists of 5 .net developers and two flash developers.

I have heard a lot of talk about GIT. Should we consider using GIT instead of TFS for source control? Is it possible to use TFS2010 together with GIT? Does anyone have similar setups that works nicely?

Any sugggestions are appreciated!

Thanks,

Kjetil.

Answer 1

The main reason you should consider Git (or Mercurial) is for:

• its Distributed nature.
• its ease of merging (a consequence, actually, of being distributed)

If your team is located in one site, and if your development process is linear enough (simple merge workflow), a centralized VCS is enough.

From there, TFS2010 has made some interesting evolutions, especially on its branching model, and its other features integrated within it (hierarchy of work items, build with "Gated Check-in" and based on a "Workflow Foundation") makes it a better candidate than a tool limited to the VCS aspect.