About a month ago, I had finally decided to start writing a simple web-based VCS manager. This is a project I had been thinking about for the last 2 years as a solution for source-code management at CodeTRAX.org, but I never really started development. The initial plan included support (repository creation only) for the most popular open-source version control systems, like subversion, mercurial, git, and bazaar. The VCS manager, actually a Django application, should be able to create source code repositories and manage user permissions on a per repository basis. It would also include an authentication/authorization backend for httpd, compatible with mod_wsgi‘s access control mechanisms, in order to provide controlled access to the repositories over HTTP or HTTPS. During the last days, after exploring several of the Mercurial features, I am quite certain that Mercurial includes all the necessary features to meet any requirement of CodeTRAX. So, I seriously consider dropping support for any other VCS except hg and try to make the VCS manager more hg specific. Now I realize that this should be the approach from the beginning. The needs are quite specific, so supporting several version control systems was completely unnecessary.

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Tags: Bazaar, Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Version Control