Mercurial
I’ve been hearing good things about distributed source control and I decided to give it a shot. When I first attempted Mercurial (Hg, as I will continue to call it) I knew that it was going to be a keeper. And it has been.
Maybe it’s because I’m impatient, but the QuickStart is where I started. After the intital setup, I found the commands to be very similar to Subversion, which I’m already quite familiar with. But the mindset is different. I can work on something locally and make small commits to that version, and finally push that to my production server when I am good and ready. And I can make another copy as a branch and work on something totally different and continue to pull from my production code so I know I’m working on the latest stuff.
One of the nice things is the .hgignore file. I like setting this up for files I don’t want to keep track of (.pyc files, anyone?) This is nicest at the beginning, of course.
Of course, this is just for my personal stuff. At work we are moving from MKS Source Integrity to Subversion and there is enough moaning and groaning about it. I can’t imagine how heads would spin around a distributed source control system.