Version 1 (modified by ibboard, 8 years ago) (diff)

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Why Mercurial and not Subversion/Git/Bazaar/etc?

On the forums, Brother Tober suggested using Git for source control. While I'm sure Git has its uses (Linus Torvalds created it for use with the Linux Kernel, so he knew what he felt wasn't provided for at the moment!) WarFoundry started with Subversion. This was mainly for familiarity and support.

As of August 2011, this position changed. The reasons why are listed below:

  1. DVCS is a big improvement over the old centralised systems. We still have a designated 'master' copy, but everyone can have their own area to tinker and experiment in without fear of breaking everything for everyone else.
  2. Further to the above, experimentation can now be version controlled and subsequently abandoned without ever 'contaminating' the master repository.
  3. The flexibility of having local copies of the code and history will hopefully encourage experimentation and contribution.
  4. Mercurial now integrates well with bug tracking software like Trac
  5. Mercurial has some sufficiently good GUI tools for committing changes and viewing history
  6. Mercurial seems friendlier than Git and better supported than Bazaar