Mercurial SCM

After saying on a Twitter feed that Mercurial rocks, a friend of mine asked me why I choose this SCM over Subversion (SVN). Trying to answer on Twitter (140 characters) was a little bit difficult, so I wrote this entry to explain why I prefer to use Mercurial over SVN.

First reason: Simplicity
Last summer, I started a small project in Visual Studio on my laptop and wanted to have file history over my test project. I tried to use SVN and configure it to work only on my file system (without any SVN server). After two hours of unsuccessful work I started to look other at options and discovered Mercurial. I installed it, read the instruction and after 15 minutes I had my SCM working on my folders without any server. Another 15 minutes later, I had Mercurial integration in Visual Studio. So far so good!

Second reason: Distributed development in a decentralized system
The biggest advantage of Mercurial over SVN is the ability to work in “disconnected” mode without loosing any feature of the SCM. You can work locally, commit how many times you want, create branches, … and when you are satisfied of your work you can submit all of it to the “parent” repository. At first, I found the decentralized system strange (I spent the last three years using Perforce), but after experimenting it, I started to appreciate that feature.

Third reason: Easy to start your own Source Server
After a week I needed to setup a Mercurial server to be able to share my repository with my friends. I started by experimenting “hg serve” (the very simple server distributed with Mercurial) but I choose to install a more robust solution. Even if the procedure seems complicated, I succeeded to install my server without difficulty following the well documented “Publishing Repositories with hgwebdir.cgi”.

I’m still continuing to use Mercurial for my personal projects, even at work (the official tool there is SVN) when I’m working on small projects. It’s a lightweight solution that doesn’t need anything special to work well. I just wanted to share my positive experience and invited you to try it.