@boldport recently asked on Twitter what version control software people used on their FPGA designs. I replied that I use git at home and Subversion at work. The reasons why take a bit more than 140 characters, so I’ve written them here!
Subversion
Work first – we were using Microsoft’s Visual Sourcesafe quite happily. Until it started to lose data on us. Not great for a version control tool!
I reviewed a load of version control systems then, and I selected Subversion as our tool of choice for version control.
One of the reasons for this was the price (not surprisingly) – I wanted to encourage everyone to start using version control for all sorts of thigns, not just the “softies”. But no-one was going to pay for project managers to have licenses for a paid-for tool.
The TortoiseSVN client integrated nicely with Explorer, so those who like GUIs are well catered for.
It’s a great tool, and has got really wide usage (yes, even amongst project managers).
It works well for FPGA designs too (but then they’re pretty much just text source code anyway!) – I have a flow which can set me up a new FPGA design by pulling starting points from a library space within our repository very quickly. And I have scripted the release process so that I ensure that a TAG is created with the unique buildid of my FPGAs at the same point as the zipfile I release to other developers is created.
One downside to Subversion is that when library code is pulled in through the svn:externals property the revision of that library code is not locked, so if that tag is pulled at a later date, you can find it pulling a later version of the external reference. There are thigns you can do about this, but you have to be proactive in doing them.
Merging has also been a pain – one of my FPGAs branched a lot at one stage, and Subversion at that stage had no knowledge of the previous branches. Since Subversion gained extra merging abilities, I haven’t had much opportunity to use them :(
If I were choosing again now, I would go with a distributed system – either Mercurial or Bazaar – both of which felt a bit Unixy (I’m in a minority in liking Unix-like systems :) and didn’t have Tortoise-like clients at the time we were making the decision.
Git
At home, I started using Subversion, but when git came around, I jumped on it. I was quite entertained by Linus Torvalds comparison of git and svn – he has a certain way with words :)
Git is certainly not for everyone – it works slightly weirdly compared to Subversion (and indeed Bazaar and Mercurial as far as I can tell).
Starting off is simple, just git init. The speed is brilliant. I love being able to switch between branches instantaneously. And the merging ability is superb.
Again, nothing FPGA specific, it’s just source code.