I’ve recently started to experiment with distributed source control systems for my personal repository. I had been using Subversion previously, but it had several issues with directories that bothered me. In addition, since my primary computer was a laptop, I also wanted to have full commit and change tracking when I was offline.
So distributed source control systems seemed to fit the bill. I looked at two systems in particular, Mercurial and git. Mercurial caught my eye because of its simplicity, and similarity with the traditional, centralized SCMs such as CVS and Subversion. However, I actually started using git first. The reason was that many open source projects had switched to git and I needed to compile several bleeding edge packages. So, I had no choice but to learn to use git. However, I couldn’t really wrap my head around it. While git is no doubt, a very powerful SCM, it was also a very complicated SCM. I took me a good hour or so before I understood how to track branches.
So, I settled for Mercurial. While I was worried that Mercurial was too immature, the fact that the Mozilla projects are also using Mercurial was very comforting.
Continue reading ‘Distributed Source Control using Mercurial’
