Using Mercurial as DSCM

A long time ago, I'd set up a CVS repository on my server, and, what with the dev team being of rather small size (at times, of size 1...) I never really felt the urge to move on with the times; I have considered several times 'upgrading' to SVN, but never really got round to it (also, scathing comments from other folks never really made me believe that it was The Right Thing for us).

However, I've recently started some development with some friends and we are, by necessity, operating in a very 'distributed' manner and we really need the ability to work also in 'disconnected' mode: myself in particular, what with being often working on a train on my way to London...

Having heard about Mercurial and always thought it would be good to give it a go, I decided today to install on my two Ubuntu boxes (the desktop and the home server) and that was as painless as it can possibly get:

  sudo apt-get install mercurial

and you're set.


Tortoise is one of the best-written 'Explorer extensions' for Windows and undoubtedly one of the reasons why I stuck along with CVS for as long as I did - there is also a TortoiseHG extension for Linux, and I've (again) installed it with extreme ease.

I will soon try out the Eclipse plugin (that is pretty critical for my workflow) but the first impression is that this really is a very lightweight, yet powerful DSCM (and we now support it on Google Code too).