Evaluating Mercurial as a posibble DVCS as opposed to Git

As some of you might know, lately I've been searching for a new tool to use as a version control system.  Currently for my job we still use Subversion.   In many ways we have outgrown it or at least we realize that we can take advantage of some of the capabilities of a distributed version control system (DVCS) - like disconnected operations, redundant backup repositories, better performance.

 To allow us to meet our team's needs we need keep a workflow similar to what we have with subversion - many clients and one master host or central repository.  I have not gone through the the process of setting up a git repository on the server - but it looks like a real headache.  It seems that even setting up a normal local file repository is a challenge.   A local file repository would be insufficient because we cannot control security with that anyway.   However to go through the whole process of setting up Git with SSH, it feels like I'm trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

This has lead me to take a look at the other possible tool - Mercurial.  I've only started playing with it and haven't quite figured out all the ins and outs and honestly don't know if it will be a better fit, although everything I see so far gives me that indication.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to indicate that I found an awesome tutorial to get started on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky at http://hginit.com.  It doesn't cover all the ins and outs of setup, but it does drive into the heart of a practical and simple way to use it.

Go ahead and give Mercurial a try.  If you do, you should probably start by downloading it from http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/.   You can always download just mercurial but toroisehg will provide you with everything you need all in one download.

My intent is to figure out how to use Mercurial from the command line to understand the its basic approach.  It seems very similar to Git, but I must confirm my assumptions.  Once I understand it I will dig into the Tortoisehg.  Once I figure out how to use it all, you can expect another post to outline exactly how to make it work.

My plan is to tie the following material into one document:

1. Use the command line from windows 2007 and 2008 Server for Mercurial
2. Setup a central repository, including security, on Windows Server 2008
3. Setup and test run a practical workflow
4. Call it from the build scripts




Until Next Time - Happy Coding.









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Putting Files on the Rackspace File Cloud

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Asp.Net MVC and I (along with some friends) am creating an Asp.Net MVC application that can access files from our website. This means that files must display on the site as well as provide a way to download/upload them. I won’t give away all the details of the project but I will say this: Sharing photos is one of the driving forces for our project.  The files are only image type files( jpg, etc) The files must be uploaded by the users and stored somewhere within our system.  We don’t necessarily know at this time how much storage space we need but we think that we will need a little at first but possibly a lot more down the road. This means that the storage of these files must be scalable. The uploading of files must be controlled by our system.  Right off the bat we started our application and were uploading files to the web server with no problem.  We only did it this way to kind of prove our system model. We wer...
Read more

Setting Up XnaMobileUnit to run unit tests in Windows Phone 7 XNA Games

Image
Introducing XnaMobileUnit I decided to roll my own unit test framework for Windows Phone 7 XNA games.   I have a couple of reasons why I decided to roll my own.  Among them was the fact that you cannot reference regular .Net assemblies from Windows Mobile Framework.  That means that referencing NUnit was out of the question.  Also using some of the other libraries that can be used for Silverlight Applications didn't quite feel right for me. The framework that I have created, XnaMobileUnit, is very simple to use and provides all the necessary functionality to run unit tests.  I am still working on the framework to provide a few more capabilities and features, but for the most part it is ready to use out of the box.  XnaMobileUnit is open source licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/xna-mobile-unit/ .  I recommend downloading the latest source and compiling it then referencing the new DLL. Othe...
Read more

Reasons to Stay Away from CSLA

We've been using CSLA - Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture in a product for approximately one year and while it solves quite a few problems it violates some major good practices. No Clear Separation of Layers While at the time that we chose CSLA we knew very little about domain driven design, it is no excuse for the framework to possess the data access layer within the business object. This makes it extremely difficult to separate the concerns. As a result, it is difficult to mock the data-access layer creating many problems when attempting to perform unit tests. This also puts the additional responsibility of data access on the business object class, violating the Single Responsibility Principle( SRP ). Data access layer should be totally separated from the business object period. Having the data access within the within the BO class is not the only additional responsibility placed on the class but is the most significant one I can think of. No Context Validation...
Read more