Not a holy war - just some salient facts

[Harry Putnam]

Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca> writes:

> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 10:04 AM, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> wrote:
>> But I'm not really clear about what is the difference between this
>> animal, a `scm' (I guess), and vcs type tools.  It appears to have
>> some kind of different focus but I'm not getting what it is.
>>
>> Wikipedia (in the first few lines) indicates the names [scm|vcs] are
>>  interchangeable ..  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control
>>
>> is that right? or do they have different intended usage?
>
> When "SCM" expands to "source code management", then yeah, it's pretty
> much the same thing as "VCS" (version control system).  So when
> Mercurial says it's an "SCM system", it means "source code
> management".
>
> When "SCM" expands to "software configuration management", that's a
> much bigger field that includes change management/bug tracking,
> version numbering policies, build systems, etc.  Version control is
> generally at the heart of software configuration management, but it's
> only one piece of a large puzzle.  This kind of SCM includes
> git/hg/bzr/svn and Bugzilla/JIRA/ant and make/SCons/cook and lots of
> other classes of tool.

Don't mean to nitpick here but this is confusing... It appears you are
saying mercurial satisfies both meanings of SCM.  That is, if in the
lower paragraph `hg' refers to mercurial.

So it seems you are trying to differentiate the meanings but then end
up saying mercurial is both.