So, I was in the mall the other day where I bumped into Marcus Ahnve. He mentioned that he had been using Mercurial instead of Subversion for his latest project.
Just before I met Marcus I had been coding on a rails project housed in subversion. I was sitting in a cafe without internet access which means that it wasn’t possible to commit changes to subversion. As my son was asleep time was scarce and I wanted to get as much done as possible. So what do you do? Well I continued coding on a different part of the application and in the end I had a fairly large changeset waiting to be committed.
This makes for bad coding practices. A large changeset is more likely to create problems for your colleagues when the do an update from the repository. I really wanted to be able to create several changesets offline and put them back in when my connection was restored.
Trying Mercurial as an alternative to Subversion
This is where Mercurial comes in. With Mercurial it is easy to create changesets when you are offline. These can be pushed to a central repository (of you have one).
Installing Mercurial in a shared hosting account should be easy if you have access to ssh, Python and Apache. Following the step by step instructions by Bill de hÓra it was easy to get Mercurial running on TextDrive.
My initial impression is that mercurial looks very promising:
- Mercurial commands are very similar to those of subversion and it was easy to set up a new repository.
- The web interface looks very nice compared to that of subversion.
- Capistrano can be used with mercurial.
- It feels marginally snappier than subversion.
- Mercurial doesn’t litter your folder tree with myriads of folders (just one in the root folder).
The next step is to migrate my subversion repository history using Tailor. If that goes well I may well become a mercurial switcher.