I am a solo dev who wants to archive and keep track of versions of projects I am working on. I need an open source version control system that has minimal overhead in terms of learning curve, setup time, etc. I don't need much, just basic versioning and backup, diff between versions, etc.

I have looked at Subversion but it has already eaten half a day. I am also interested in cvs but am not clear on the differences between them. I have also heard of ant but know little about it.

Anyone want to make a suggestion?

Thanks

Eric

Mercurial is really nice for your kind of setup. Really easy to use.

to put an existing project under version control
cd to project directory
hg init
hg add *
hg commit

It even has a built in server so if you want to peruse it via a web browser just cd into the directory and type hg serve and point the browser at localhost:8000

use clone to duplicate a repo, like for instance I use a laptop a lot so I clone the repo from my desktop to my laptop, this also lets me push the changes back easily to the desktop

hg clone ssh://user@name_or_ip_of_desktop/path/relative/to/repo local_name_for_repo

and to send the changes back after a local commit just hg push with no arguments and it'll send them to the repo they were cloned from.

Since its a distributed version control each repo has the full history, no need to be connected to a network to query a remote server.

sccs is easy to understand and doesn't have the learning curve the rest have. It's also not as commonly used in Linux.

"cvs" is still somewhat popular and there aren't that many commands. It seems to be gradually losing out to "bazaar" (bzr) and "git" though. For a while it looked as though "subversion" (svn) was coming out on top, but even that seems to be slowly losing to git and bzr.

The most important thing is that the software provides the features you need; the time taken to learn how to use it is not the primary factor.