On Nov 10, 2007, at 12:31 PM, s.ross wrote:
Granted svn can be a pain to set up, but is Mercurial generally accepted by the Open Source community? Right now, if someone wants to pass around a new Textmate bundle or Rails plugin, they point to an svn repo and the deal is done. I haven't looked into Mercurial too carefully, but if it's better and can be accessed by svn users transparently (riiiigggt :) then it could be a godsend.
Any thoughts on that?
I recommend Subversion in these cases: You're working on an existing Subversion repo (No sense switching if it works for you) You're working with people you use Subversion Any other form of necessary interoperability. EG: Most rails plugins are in subversion so that people can easily subscribe to them with svn:externals
I recommend Mercurial: For new projects with a single user For small projects that you aren't likely to share For projects that include a lot of Mac bundle files like numbers documents and such (Svn requires putting a .svn folder in every subfolder of your project. Mercurial has a single one at the root) When you must be able to work offline for long periods of time When you want to totally annoy people who know subversion ;)
For Subversion the pattern is a bit different than with Mercurial. For Subversion, since creating a repository is so painful, people tend to make a large repo that contains multiple subprojects. EG: Macromates bundle repo. For Mercurial, it would make the most sense to have a separate Mercurial project per project, or per bundle. Since it's not as easy to checkout only a subfolder of a project (afaik).
I should really move some of my existing projects to Mercurial. It really is much more of a pain to use svn but I'm just in the habbit. And I just hooked up all my repos to update an ical calendar oncommit hook. I'm not sure how to do that in Mercurial.
—Thomas Aylott – subtleGradient—