I had no idea mercurial existed until i read this post by joel spolsky. By contrast, while we were working separately in mercurial, mercurial was busy keeping a. But to me the mere fact that there are so many posts on. The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of. Theres been talk at work about switching from subversion to mercurial, and this is a handy intro. Its not a simple challenge, and to get a full answer would take a considerable investigation and a. Mercurial has px which spans across branches, how useless. Could you provide a concrete example where merging with git mercurial lead to less merge conflicts compared to svn please. This guide skips the conceptual explanations to focus only on the practical usage. The biggest thing for me in mercurial s favor was the nearly universal opinion that it had better documentation and had an easier learning curve. Also includes a section explaining the differences between svn and. Feb 24, 2010 proof that joel still has something to offer developers besides if you were any good youd be on stackoverflow right now. If you havent figured it out by now, i think this is a big deal. Joel continues to stay on top of new technology and as senior resource, made several recommendations for improvements to.
Highest voted mercurial questions page 4 stack overflow. A collection of useful introductions and tutorials for new mercurial users. Distributed version control is here to stay, baby joel on software. The guerrilla guide to interviewing joel on software. Joel on software on mercurial on hginit developing with. Mercurial is used by developers, and advanced users who need the very latest changes to the software before releases occur.
Compare the best free open source mercurial software at sourceforge. Mercurial hg is a source code management scm, a tool for software developers which supports collaborative development of software within a team, and the tracking of changes to software source code over time. What are the benefits of mercurial or git over svn for. He was a program manager on the microsoft excel team between 1991 and 1994.
My website joel on software is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. Joel corley is very discipline and productive senior software developer. Long before this podcast occurred, my team had switched to mercurial, and the switch really confused me, so i hired someone to check in code. May 16, 2010 joel on software on mercurial on hginit today i read a blog post written by joel spolsky where at the beginning he claims that distributed version control systems dvcs like mercurial are just more complicated than centralised version control systems like subversion. Mercurial is a modern, open source, distributed version control system, and a. Peter buckley im not uptodate on mercurial, but based on joel s article alone i would say there is no difference between mercurial s changes and perforces changelists. Thanks for contributing an answer to software engineering stack exchange. Mercurial source code management system an alphabetical list of commands, with descriptions and command flags. I think the hg site documentation is fine, but i have to say, joel s is more fun right out the gate. With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part. Yeah, i was resisting looking at the article at first but was curious as to how he could work shameless selfpromotion into an hg tutorial. In this userfriendly, sixpart tutorial, joel spolsky teaches you the key concepts of mercurial.
Youre reading joel on software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies. I am the current maintainer of ccache, originally written by andrew tridge tridgell. Source code control is just as important today, and not just for teams. Joel on software is a collection of joels blog posts. There are many popular revision control systems available cvs, svn, git, etc. Im switching source code control systems from subversion to mercurial. More than just an intro and tutorial on mercurial though it has those, too. Mar 23, 2000 i wrote a tutorial for my favorite dvcs, mercurial. Source control was the very first item on joel spolskys joel test for the quality of a development team back in 2000. Now, a few days into working with mercurial professionally bitbucket mercurial tortoisehg visualhg, i have to say the tools seem a bit dated. Matt mackall originated mercurial and served as its lead developer until late 2016. It offers you the power to efficiently handle projects of any size while using an intuitive interface. Like its predecessor, more joel on software, by joel spolsky, is a collection of essays that had been published in the joel on software blog.
A short overview of mercurial s decentralized model is also available. One of the biggest new features is kiln harmony, which lets you operate on kiln repositories using either git or mercurial. What are the benefits of mercurial or git over svn for branchingmerging. In software development, distributed version control also known as distributed revision control is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developers computer. These files do not exist by default and you will have to create the appropriate configuration files yourself.
The best mercurial tutorial is hg init by joel spolsky. When im committing something that has 30 files changed, its nice to just use a gui to checkuncheck what should be committed, what should go into ignore, double click to get a diff, etc. Joel on software on mercurial on hginit today i read a blog post written by joel spolsky where at the beginning he claims that distributed version control systems dvcs like mercurial are just more complicated than centralised version control systems like subversion. Mercurial reads configuration data from several files, if they exist. Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool.
Avram joel spolsky born 1965 is a software engineer and writer. Now we start to get to the what i had missed regarding distributed version control systems. In that podcast, i said, to me, the fact that they make branching and merging easier just means that your coworkers. Although i appreciate his zeal, i am admittedly skeptical of his decision to tie the fate of kiln to a technology that 1 is still in the early adopter phase. I was relieved that this was not his last word about mercurial. Glitch is a collaborative programming environment that lives in your browser and deploys code as you type. Mercurial supports a multitude of workflows and you can easily enhance its functionality with extensions. Joel corley senior software engineer architect aim. It is no secret why joel is hawking mercurial so fiercely given that to have any use for his new kiln software you pretty much have to first migrate to mercurial. Id been meaning to make some of my code accessible via a web interface. Its an example of a centralized version control system cvcs, which is very easy to understand. One thing i dont quite get is why all the tutorials only use command line. Funny how some things can turn out to be much easier than you fear.
The integration with visual studio is like luke warm coffee hohum, and the explorer integration takes me back to the good ol days when i was lucky to not be working on visual source safe. Joel spolskys concise guide to finding the best technical talent apress 2007. Team foundation version 2010team foundation version controltfvc. The joel on software discussion group, in long decline, will close. Bitbucket is a web hosting service for mercurial repositories. Mar 17, 2010 a while ago jeff and i had eric sink on the stack overflow podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like mercurial and git. Free, secure and fast mercurial software downloads from the largest open source applications and software directory. I have had a lot of success using mercurial, so when i found out the guy running stack overflow and joel from joel on software had a web based mercurial called kiln i became very interested. View the project on github ebookfoundationfreeprogrammingbooks.
Why did the stack overflow team decide to use mercurial. Making all posts independent makes it easy to pick up the book every now and then, read one, and move on. It is supported on microsoft windows and unixlike systems, such as freebsd, macos and linux mercurial s major design goals include high performance and scalability, decentralization, fully distributed collaborative development, robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging. Mercurial is a distributed version control system dvcs, similar to git, but very different from older. I started with mercurial, because id heard anecdotally that its more windows friendly and generally nicer to work with than git. Joel spolsky had the same concerns about git when he first started. Its possible to update the information on mercurial scm or report it as discontinued, duplicated or spam. I wrote a tutorial for my favorite dvcs, mercurial. A tutorial on using mercurial publishing mercurial repositories publishing repositories with hgwebdir. Source control tools serve two primary purposes in bi development groups.
Its not a simple challenge, and to get a full answer would take a considerable investigation and a lengthy report at the end. I have this funny feeling that joel spolsky probably does not need to read my blog for advice on effective software marketing. The quality of these essays is more uneven than in the first book, but there are nonetheless some true gems. According to this blog post from 2010, stack exchange is using mercurial for version control for the benefits of collaborative code development. In contrast to some of my other technology choices, i wasnt using mercurial to learn mercurial i was using it because i wanted to manage change safely within my project. Mercurial is a distributed revisioncontrol tool for software developers. The definitive guide this is a complete online book on mercurial. As it happens i started moving to mercurial yesterday, how is that for luck. At the end i talk a little bit about the tradeoffs between centralized and distributed vcss.
A subversion users guide to mercurial version control wired. Ive been a long time subversion user, and im very comfortable with its quirks and limitations. Back in 2000, two visionary founders, joel spolsky and michael pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it. Reading last joel on software blog entry, i didnt get it exactly why. Source code control with git and mercurial visual studio. You can follow our simple guide to learn how to revision your documents with mercurial, or just use the quick start to get going instantly.
When you read the latest book about extreme programming, or one of steve mcconnell s excellent books, or joel on software, or software development magazine, you see a lot of claims about how to do software development, but you hardly ever see any mention of what kind of development theyre talking about, which is unfortunate, because sometimes you need to do things differently in different worlds. He is the author of joel on software, a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software trello. Every user of every kiln repo can choose either mercurial or git, and everything always works. Illustrated stepbystep guide to mercurial basics from joel on software. Also includes a section explaining the differences between svn and mercurial. Mercurial is released as free software under the terms of the gnu gpl v2 or any later version. The absolute minimum every software developer absolutely. Whatever you do to a kiln repository using git will be immediately visible to mercurial users and vice versa. Ive heard for instance that merging branches with git or mercurial is easier than with svn. He didnt do a very good job of saying exactly what mercurial does, but he said enough for me to go googling. Gits command line is also better, it gives the user hints, mercurials does not. Do you use source control tools to manage your software development process.
After concluding a few successful software architecture design and implementation phases, i want to take a moment to write down some of the principles i have learned, and how they can simplify the architectural design process. The one page of x8664 that lists commonly used instructions and addressing modes. But avoid asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. Source code management mercurial kiln or an ode to joel.
Mercurial scm sometimes referred to as mercurial was added by dholm in may 2009 and the latest update was made in mar 2019. Ive used mostly svn but have been looking into git and mercurial lately. Mercurial source code version control getting started. I wont get into why joel says that branching and merging is better under mercurial than under subversion, but it is interesting. It is mainly implemented using the python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in c. Then i ran across joel spolskys awesome mercurial overview. Mercurial is just not as flexible, even with all the plugins like histedit, shelf and rebase. Global configuration like the username setting is typically put into. It is easy to use and hard to break, making it ideal for anyone working with versioned files. Do you see now that we have the same problems with plm software that joel was describing with centralized source control systems. There are maybe 40 posts and the book is about 350 pages. I have written four books about software development, including smart and gets things done. A weblog by joel spolsky, a programmer working in new york city, about software and software companies.
Joel has an opinion on everything and a fairly strong one. The joel test for 2017 21 minute read back in 20, i took a course on software architecture, process, and management. See the complete profile on linkedin and discover joels. I was additionally spurred by reading the first chapter of hginit, an ebook by joel spolsky of joel on software fame. Every project eventually needs to delve into managing their source code. Sep 25, 2018 back in 2000, two visionary founders, joel spolsky and michael pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people both its employees and its customers. Joel howard software engineer matrix pointe software. Subversion tracks versions, mercurial tracks changes. This is possibly the biggest advance in software development technology in the ten years ive been writing articles here.
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