Understanding Mercurial from the ground up
Summary
Joel Spolsky's Hg Init is a practical guide to distributed version control, local history, merging and collaboration with remote repositories. Distributed version control separates backup, publication and collaboration from each other. A good learning model explains the data flow first and the individual commands only afterwards.
Ideas
- Every Mercurial clone contains the complete project history and works without a central server.
- Commits save local work, while push and pull synchronise repositories with each other.
- Merges deliberately join diverging lines of development instead of silently overwriting changes.
Recommendations
- Practise cloning, independent commits and a deliberate merge in a test project.
- Before migrating, check extensions, hosting and existing automation.
References
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