Mercurial vs Subversion in toadlet

After a couple hours of reading and an indeterminate time of testing, we've decided Toadlet will switch to using Mercurial when it goes live as OSS on google code.

We're pretty big SVN fans here, no mistake. But there are some really clear advantages to using a DVCS system in software development. Especially since we've been pretty free with the commits of code that isn't quite working into mainline toadlet. You just can't go on doing that when the project is out in the open.

Which means you either need to not commit so much (yuk), start using a lot more branches (eh), or switch to a system that makes commits local until you're ready to push them out. DVCS fits really well with our mode of developement here, and will be even better when the work is available for everyone to see, use, and hack on.

Of course, we'll continue to use SVN for binary-file intensive projects here. SVN's ability to lock files, and the lack of a need to pull over the entire project history upon checkout really lowers network traffic for large files, makes it hard to beat for our engineering work. But when it comes to software code projects, it would seem the writing is on the wall. DVCS here we come.