During our developer meetings last week, Eddie brought up the potential of
switching from Subversion to Mercurial for source control. After doing some
reading (and no actual experimentation) I wanted to put out my thoughts in
order to get the conversation going again.
Benefits provided by Mercurial:
- Performance gains when doing commits, diffs, and merges against what is
currently in the central SVN repository
- Ability to work completely offline (such as in an airplane)
- Potentially promotes a more open feeling with regard to community members
having the ability to commit code changes
- Allows for private code experimentation without the need to make formal
commits to formal branches
- No more .svn directories everywhere
Notes:
- We would still need a copy of the code acting as a central repository in
order to perform backups and keep a continuously integrated trunk over which
automated tests can be run
- Merging would likely still need to happen with a centralized repository,
otherwise the need to merge the same changes into multiple places could
become a major headache, not to mention the issues related to keeping track
of which changes have been merged where.
Concerns:
- Committing locally means that until you merge your branch, none of your
work is backed up. This puts the burden of consistent code backups on each
developer.
- SVN provides code-watch updates on each commit which helps developers keep
track of what everyone else is doing. With local commits we would likely
only see such messages on branch merge. In general, it seems that a central
repository promotes more openness and communication than a distributed
source model.
- It's not clear how tagged releases would work with Mercurial.
- We're requiring the community to become familiar with a new source control
system in order to work with our code, could this be an unintentional
barrier to entry?
Thoughts?
Bill
p.s. I found this blog posting (particularly the comment trail) to be
particularly useful in thinking about the tradeoffs:
http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=20
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