My Mercurial Workflow
About a year ago, I wrote an article on this website about Version Control. In that article, I touted the glory of Subversion, and mentioned:
“I’ve since tried other VCS systems like Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar, but have not found any compelling reason to switch.”
Well, I’ve since found my compelling reasons to switch. SVN lost some of our files, and it was a pain to do all sorts of stuff (get setup, keep clean, branch, merge, etc). I won’t get into; there are enough rants about Subversion on the ‘net already. We use Mercurial now, and boy has our workflow improved.
Mercurial is my new favorite child, because it’s easy to setup, easy to use, easy to branch and merge, and easy to teach to my students. Oh, and it just works. Sometimes I think it runs off magic. Read more
Biting the Distributed Development Bullet
Like most development n00bs, after I started using version control, I never looked back. And neither should you.
It required me to change the whole way that my office operated, though. See, the way that we were doing things before seemed so simple; we just edited files and shouted at each other if we collided in our editing. As it turns out, this was a bad thing, and there have been better alternatives around way longer than I’ve even been in this business.
But like most crotchety, over-egotistical developer-types it took a while for me to come around. Here’s a brief history of my flirtations and eventual commitment to version control.
I am an IT Professional in Tallahassee, Florida with a degree in Information Science.