Mercurial Redux

A couple of months ago we posted a blog entry comparing Mercurial and Subversion for use in toadlet. After 2-3 months of heavy Hg use, we're now totally convinced of the complete excellence that is distributed version control.

It's just amazing what a paradigm shift can do for you once you've gotten your head around it. The ability to seamlessly move and merge code between any one of us, at any time, with or without a server involved, is phenomenal. And the freedom of experimentation is great. You can clone your repository, charge down very divergent code paths, committing all the while and sharing the results as needed. And if it goes nowhere - throw it all away. If it works great, merge it back.

And say you're working on some other huge software project and you have your own changes you want to track? Mercurial patchsets are just the ticket. They removed a whole nasty set of diffs and patches for my custom Tahoe code portions, while letting me stay in sync with the main tree (and their CVS ways).

Since we've made the switch, the mainline toadlet has been more stable without going out of date. And we've added what feels like 10%+ code-productivity. Mercurial has been so good to us, Lightning Toads made a financial donation this past year to the project. Just to show our thanks.

In a nutshell, if you develop software, and you are not using a DVCS system like Mercurial or Git, you don't know what you're missing. Subversion, we shall not meet again.