We've been using Subversion for some time, and it's been a good
SCM/VCS, but now we're switching to Mercurial (Hg). We also considered
some of the other DVCS out there: Git, Bazaar, and Fossil. IMO, Hg
offers the best balance of features, popularity, and ease of use.

I recently came across a good overview and mini-tutorial of Hg that
some may find of interest. It's written by Joel S. (JoelOnSoftware,
FogBugz, StackOverflow). Of particular interest to existing Subversion
users is the first part of the tutorial called "Subversion
Re-education".

Tutorial link - http://hginit.com

== Mercurial Links ==
Mercurial - http://mercurial.selenic.com
Tortoise Hg - http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org
Mac Hg - http://jasonfharris.com/machg

== Other DVCS ==
Git - http://git-scm.com
Bazaar - http://bazaar.canonical.com
Fossil - http://www.fossil-scm.org

--
Kevin Powick

"Kevin Powick" <nospam (AT) spamless (DOT) com> wrote

Been using SubVersion for some time, so this is very helpful, thanks.

Others in the company are using Git, which is nice for Linux, but not
so much for Windoze. Git does branching better than SubVersion, which
is why they're using it. The doc says Hg is better at branching, too.
And this is a gem: "Subversion team members often go days or weeks
without checking anything in." Word!


--
frosty
not ready to use something called "Fossil" quite yet.
=`:^p

On your recommendation I'll take a closer look at Hg.

Over time I've been put off by the variety and state of the VCS tool
market. Lately it seems every other project uses some other VCS -
each project author has their own preference and if you want to work
on their FOSS project you need to use their tools. So in order to get
any work done in this environment one potentially needs to have a good
grasp on All of them, as well as keeping up with the latest client
utilities. No, I won't play. It's too much honkin work, too many
details, and too much "wonderful" FOSS that changes daily - literally.
With some of this stuff we can (and I often do) spend more time
dabbling with the tools and funky APIs than with the application code
I'm trying to build.

Again, I'll look at Hg, it's been around for a while now and it's time
to check it out. But man, I wish one of these days VCS, blogs, wikis,
forums, and everything else could get standardized to interoperate so
that every option didn't have to be so time consumingly unique - in
the name of saving us time and effort.

T

On 2010-08-26 16:29:14 -0400, Tony Gravagno <nospam (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid> said:

Yeah, it's not such a problem if you standardize on what your own
company uses, but if you want to play with all the different projects
out there, it looks like you have to learn a few of these systems.

--
Kevin Powick

Kevin,

I've been using Mercurial to manage my own projects (one of which is a
Python web app front end for Mercurial so I can use a hosting service
without having to resort to ssh).

My personal experience is that it is quite easy to use (once I got my
head around the entire distributed aspect) and now I cannot imagine
why I would switch to anything else. But, trying to persuade one of my
biggest customers to switch from pvcs became impossible once they
realised that distributed version control is more than just a slightly
different name but actually implies a totally different way of
managing software development. Seems that was just one paradigm shift
too many and the proposal never got any further. Embracing dvcs
definitely takes some adjustment in thinking!

Obviously you don't have these reservations but it seems to me that
the revolution that Spolsky enthuses about is still some way off
because many people have strong (but not unfounded) ideas of what a
vcs should do. There is a place for products like hg and git but I
think their increased success may end up being tied to whether remote
working ever really takes off in a big way. If it does, then
'traditional' tools may well be seen to be less attractive.

If you're interested in hosting Mercurial on a web server, let me know
if I can help with advice or code examples, both free (as in beer, I'm
not trying to sell something).

All the best

Ian

On 2010-08-27 12:25:47 -0400, ianp <ianp0512 (AT) gmail (DOT) com> said:

Hi Ian,

I'm glad you've found it a worthwhile transition. I expect we will
find the same. While it's a little different than SVN, it's not so
different as to be thought of as too radical by the team.

While usage without the need to be connected to a server is a big
advantage, I don't think that the success of DVCS is actually tied to
it. It is the nature of "lockless" (no check-out required) VCS that is
the main advantage of today's VCS products. DVCS is an extension of
this paradigm.

CVS was the first player, or at least the first popular one, to the
"lockless" game, followed by SVN and the huge improvements it offered
over CVS. Rapid adoption of SVN allowed it to become the currently
dominant standard in lockless systems. This was actually nice because,
as a "standard", it was easy to comfortably integrate into an
organization.

The "standardization" of DVCS is going to be a different story.
Multiple DVCS players came to market in a relatively short period of
time, and there seems to be a bit of a war for mindshare amongst them.
As for current popularity, I believe they fall into the following
order: Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, & Fossil. At least that is my
impression.

While it will be interesting to see if any one of them becomes a
standard, it does mean that, as lamented by Tony G., you may be forced
to learn more than one VCS in order to participate in different
projects.

It's not necessary for us at the moment, and I do have a personal Hg
account at bitbucket, but I appreciate the offer.

Regards,

--
Kevin Powick

I am actually trying to host my projects on the web using
hgwebdir.cgi. I have managed to overcome most of the problems till
now. The last thing that is giving me trouble is hooks call. I have a
hooks call to restrict push -f by users. The hooks call is working
fine over ssh, but it is not the case with https.

I have tried the following steps
1. changing the file ownership of the shell script to be executed on
the hooks call to www-data
2. Tried ssh on a different repository, hooks get called and the shell
script gets executed successfully

My doubt is whether hooks gets called only via ssh ?
if not how to do it via https ?

On 2010-09-02 06:27:34 -0400, PM <praveenmadh (AT) gmail (DOT) com> said:

I would try asking this question on a site with more focus on the product.

http://mercurial.selenic.com/

I haven't been using it long enough, or encountered your requirement,
so I really don't have any good suggestions.

--
Kevin Powick

On Sep 2, 8:51*am, Kevin Powick <nos... (AT) spamless (DOT) com> wrote:
Hi Kevin,

I am using Hg in my organization as well. Not a lot of traction with
my fellow devs yet, but at the moment I basically act as librarian for
the system.
Some of the push by https problems may be related to webserver
choice. I have not used https, just http.

If you have access to freenode, the #mercurial channel is quite active
and very helpful.

We should compare notes on some of the tougher aspects of versioning
MV systems. The source code is easy, the dicts are another story. We
are also using SB+ for screens, so there are a LOT of objects with
code.

Steve

On 2010-09-03 10:42:20 -0400, slestak <slestak989 (AT) gmail (DOT) com> said:

Hi Steve,

MV is not a huge part of our business these days, so we're only
versioning code. We don't use SB+, so that is another versioning
requirement to not have to worry about. ;-)

I am enjoying Mercurial as our team makes the transition from SVN.

Regards,

--
Kevin Powick