We're Subversion Geeks and we want to know the benefits of Mercurial
- by Matt
Having read I'm a Subversion geek, why should I consider or not consider Mercurial or Git or any other DVCS.
I have a related follow up question. I read that question and read the recommended links and videos and I see the benefits but I don't see the overall mindshift people are talking about.
Our team is of 8-10 developers that work on one large code base consisting of 60 projects. We use Subversion and have a main trunk. When a developer starts a new Fogbugz case they create a svn branch, do the work on the branch and when they're done they merge back to the trunk. Occasionally they may stay on the branch for an extended time and merge the trunk to the branch to pick up the changes.
When I watched Linus talk about people creating a branch and never doing it again, that's not us at all. We create probably 50-100 branches a week without issue. The biggest challenge is the merging but we've gotten pretty good at that as well. I tend to merge by fogbugz case & checkin rather than the entire root of the branch.
We never work remotely and we never make branches off of branches. If you're the only one working in that section of the code base then the merge to the trunk goes smoothly. If someone else had modified the same section of code then the merge can get messy and you might need to do some surgery. Conflicts are conflicts, I don't see how any system could get it right most of the time unless if was smart enough to understand the code.
After creating a branch the following checkout of 60k+ files takes some time but that would be an issue with any source control system we'd use.
Is there some benefit of any DVCS that we're not seeing that would be of great help to us?
