> On 9/20/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne at ca.afilias.info> wrote:
>> Subversion: Requires Apache, Perl, Python...
>
> This is inaccurate. Subversion does not have dependencies (that it
> doesn't ship with). It can optionally build bindings and mod_dav_svn
> which would imply these things, but they're definitely not
> requirements.

Evidently my looking at what Debian draws in was somewhat overexuberant.

Oh, well, the dependancies tend to be fairly irrelevant these days unless
you're planning to install an SCM system by hand.  (Yay!  Slackware of the
1990s...)

I hope that there turn out to be more substantive issues on SCM choices
than merely whether or not I counted package dependancies correctly... 
For all that it's good not to perpetuate false claims about things, this
doesn't seem to me to be an issue worthy of, well, any attention.

On Debian (and Ubuntu), installing all of the named SCM systems is as
simple as:

# apt-get install darcs mercurial git-core subversion

On FreeBSD, it should be as easy as:

# for i in darcs mercurial git subversion; do
>   cd /usr/ports/devel/$i
>   make install
> done

(which ignores pkg options)

I haven't a Fedora system handy to figure out if it's *slightly* more
complex than either of the above.  I doubt it's materially more difficult
to get any of these SCM systems installed.

They also all have MacOS-X and Windows ports, so none of these choices
would leave anyone out in the cold, I don't think.  (Darcs won't play well
on AIX, because it's in Haskell, and there isn't presently a GHC port to
AIX, but I don't see a forcible problem there...)

The one of these that I've used, materially, is Darcs.  The downside is
the use of a generally obscure implementation language.  What I very much
like about it is that it needs no special server protocols; nothing more
than *any* HTTP server.  And it has no bits of opaque binary data...

If people have had experiences to particularly encourage or discourage
others, that would be useful.