Switch from SVN to xxx ?

[Martin Geisler]

Tom Widmer <tom.widmer at googlemail.com> writes:

> [...] If you use a continuous integration server, most systems support
> Git (and many don't support bzr or hg).

Please tell us which systems that is -- I think it would be interesting
for the rest of this list to hear which systems have no support for
Bazaar, and I would like to hear which lack support for Mercurial.

> Bazaar and Git's branching models works better with heavy-weight IDEs
> (since you can switch a checkout between branches, much like SVN
> (except much much quicker!)). Mercurial supports this for named
> branches, but they are only recommended for long lived branches (such
> as release ones).

That is a quite crude explanation. Mercurial lets you checkout any
changeset in the history graph, be it on a particular named branch or
not. Mercurial's branching model can be seen as a super-set of Git's
model in that we also support multiple branches per repository,
anonymous or not. This article explains it well:

  http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

> HG bookmarks also allow this, but are not a core
> feature, and local only at the moment I think.

Yes, bookmarks are not transferred on push/pull.

> The different branching models are a major concern if you are using a
> heavy weight IDE. You can't possibly afford to use one-branch-per-bug
> for a large project using a Java IDE in HG for example, since that
> requires initialising your IDE for a new working tree

That is not true -- using anonymous or named branches would be fine for
this as described here:

  http://mercurial.aragost.com/kick-start/tasks.html

-- 
Martin Geisler

aragost Trifork
Professional Mercurial support
http://aragost.com/mercurial/