Thursday, June 26, 2008

DVCS? I'm sold

As a casual reader of DVCS advantages like git and mercurial, I think I am ready. Motivated by a great article shared by Kit Plummer, I am sold and ready to start using it. Unfortunately, it's probably not going to happen any time soon at work until a) IT supports a mercurial server like they do svn or b) I start a new project were new decisions like language (ruby/groovy) and source control can be made and I'm not hindered by "we are already using svn, why switch" or "I just got comfortable with svn" or "every team member would have to learn mercurial". Reminds me of my favoriate Zed Shaw quote from this article:
"This folks is the classic problem with programmers today. They absolutely refuse to learn anything new unless they can see that learning the new hotness will give them an immediate 200% boost in salary or get them hot honeys at the next conference."
Now that I see that Hudson has a mercurial plugin and Jira does as well, then technically speaking, I can't think of any other reason not to switch.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 26, 2008 at 10:32 AM

    James,

    I'm working it. Our CBD offering will support Git, hg and svn. Hang in there. ;)

    Really, there's no reason you can't start using Mercurial, locally on your dev machine. I'm actually starting to use it on top of svn checkouts.

    As far as infrastructure support goes...they won't provide it until it is more trouble to battle the cowboy instances that are disrupting their customer support perception. I'm pretty sure someone is hard at work firing up git support for Hudson too. No excuses my friend.

    A lot of folks are using Github to mirror svn repos too. Not sure why. But it is being done.

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  2. AnonymousJune 28, 2008 at 4:16 PM

    Absolutely agree! You do not need central it support it's a DVCS.

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  3. UnknownAugust 27, 2009 at 3:57 AM

    I use bazaar DVCS (http://bazaar-vcs.org)
    which with the help of the bzr-svn plugin (http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrForeignBranches/Subversion)
    I can work on my laptop in a DVCS fashion (i.e only use bzr and bzr tools), then I just push to our central svn server.

    The other devs doesn't even need to know/care that I don't want to use svn.

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