versioncontrol 5.x-1.0

So, the Version Control API doesn't yet live up to all that it promises to achieve, but it works well enough for what it does and should really get a stable release before more of the looming large database changes come up again. At this point, there are working backends for CVS, Git and Mercurial - all of them offer commit log functionality, and CVS also supports access control. Project node integration (versioncontrol_project) provides an optional extension to the core functionality with a mapping of commits to projects and associated access control rules.

Compared to a project*/cvslog based solution, Version Control API & friends currently still lacks integration with project release nodes and probably has suboptimal performance for large repositories with huge masses of commits. Both of those issues will be taken on for the 6.x version, and if you just need a log viewer for one or more (simultaneously) of the above version control systems then you might already find this set of modules quite appealing :)

There have been a number of fixes and improvements since 1.0-rc4 was released:

• A rather large change of the database schema which conceptually unifies commits, branch operations and tag operations. Won't be the last large database change, unfortunately... but it's getting better all the time really.
• Support for the Metrics module, displaying added/removed line counts if a module provides those.
• Fixes to the documentation and syntax correctness of the example FakeVCS backend module.
• Various fixes to prevent PHP errors and bad looks in certain cases.

If you're a developer and version control guru (or want to become one), this release is a solid base to write your VCS backend for. Some details will still change and more work done by the API module in the future, but the basic architecture is fixed and the main challenges for writing a backend stay the same. Actually, what I'd really like to see is a Bazaar backend - together with the soon-to-come Subversion backend, we could cover all major version control systems out there.

If you're updating from previous versions, make damn sure that the CVS backend also has the module files updated to versioncontrol_cvs 5.x-1.0 and the module is enabled. For new installations (including all versions of Git and Mercurial up to now), there's nothing to fear except maybe for the rather complex hook-up of your Drupal with CVS trigger scripts.

Hope you like it! If you miss something or discover a bug, please report back (there's a fine place for that) and consider contributing with code or documentation.