I love git but it's too heavy for my colleagues.. which DVCs has the lowest barrier of entry?

Question

TL;DR: I'm looking for a DVCS with a much simpler (and less dangerous) command set than Git, which rocks on Windows and MacOS X.

To give you some background:

I've been the only one testing Git for Revision Control at my company for about 6 months.

I realized today that Git is actually WAY too heavy for my colleagues when I had to spent a good chunk of the day restoring a corrupted repository.

I'm a .NET and Rails developer and I really like UNIX!

The rest of my colleges are data bods and Excel developers (make fun all you like but they do some SERIOUSLY hard-core stuff with data in Excel VBA and T-SQL).

On the other hand, they can't stand unix and barf at the idea of using the command line for anything except nostalgia.

While I know there are some great Git GUIs now and the CLI has seen some massive improvements, Git is still a massive difference in workflow for them as they use currently dropbox to collaborate on worksheet code etc..

At the moment the only option seems to be Mercurial.

Is this close enough to what we need or is there something simpler (a great GUI would be nice too)?

By the way: Open Source isn't necessary and we're open to spending some money.

---

After much thinking I've decided to leave things for now. I really enjoy Git myself but some people just can't get on board with revision control.

So I'll continue to force Git on the web team but leave the data nerds be!

Answer 1

Mercurial is simple DVCS and a powerful one to extend.

• https://www.mercurial-scm.org
• Joel Spolsky's tutorial: http://hginit.com/

Subversion being older has more UI tools but DVCS are not far behind.

You could use a UI : TortoiseHg which can be used on windows and there is http://jasonfharris.com/machg/ which is rocking UI for Mac.

Answer 2

Don't give up on git. Train and support and they will like it. I was in the same boat and we came out ahead in the end. Well worth the effort.

Gitk and git gui are great if they are command line adverse.

You are heading down a path of a graphic studio not using Photoshop because it's "too hard to learn" - so they go with MS Paint. Don't do that.

UPDATE:

With the use of git attributes, you can store the excel files as uncompressed xml. You can now do diffs between them. Not sure how useful that would be. It depends of how much of the excel sheets you are changing and how.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Repos can corrupt in any VCS. The interesting difference with git is that the errors are more often recoverable beyond just a simple restore from a backup, although as you've discovered it can take some real voodoo. That doesn't preclude the lighter restore from backup option, though.

Personally, I think bazaar is the easiest DVCS for a beginner to learn on their own. They have great documentation and a newbie-friendly community. It's what I started out on. However, with as much git experience as you have, I think you would find bazaar limiting. Mercurial is much more on par with git feature and power-wise, and has a less unixy command line, but you're going to be avoiding the CLI anyway.

I would recommend putting them on TortoiseGit. The workflow is going to be a change for them no matter what, and there are things you can do to make it easier for them. Remember they will be getting training and support from you, which is going to be much more newbie-friendly to them than the git man pages or whatever you've been using.

I would recommend starting them out without any branching, just pull, commit, and push from master to origin. This is just about as easy with TortoiseGit as with any other VCS. Create a different local folder with a different repository if they need to work on more than one branch at once, which is about as close to dropbox sharing as you can get. Then you can introduce more advanced concepts as they start to demand them.