Sunday, 8 March 2009

Mercurial?

My first attempt at blogging... here goes.

In case anyone is interested, the title is a catch phrase from a character Jesse in the Fast Show (UK TV Comedy).

Today I 'ave mainly been thinking about ... the options available for sharing source files.

Over the years I have used DEC CMS, *nix RCS, CVS and most recently SVN.

I am aware that there are several alternatives available, and today I have invested some time looking at Mercurial as an alternative to svn

 On the whole I like svn but I have had problems when I have attempted to move files around (re-factoring often causes this), especially renaming folders seems to cause me a bit of trouble when I come to commit. 

I have also noticed that the Python community are considering the options to move away from subversion. See python PEP 374.

Here are my early thoughts.

Getting a svn repository and converting it to Mercurial went very smoothly. I had 2 attempts: First I let it get all revisions. Even for a smallish library it took quite a time to construct the new repository. On my second attempt I only asked for the last 3 revisions and this was much quicker.

Now I have just got to get into the Mercurial mindset and find an appropriate work flow.

One barrier to use may be finding a place to host my Mercurial repository.

More later.

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