Eclipse as IDE + Mercurial for version control + ? Bug tracking = Good idea?

Question

Hi,

For a new Java web project I thought about using:

• Eclipse as IDE
• Mercurial for version control
• Some kind of bug tracking software

I have heard of bug tracking software where you can tie a change to an unresolved bug when you check it in. I haven't used any such solution myself, but it sounds good. Are there any good bug tracking applications which work well in combination with Eclipse and Mercurial and lets you tie a change to an unresolved bug? And if not, are there at least good plug ins for Eclipse to use Mercurial for version control? Would it support hg rename and hg copy?

If I can get something good working using a mix of the above three components I plan on throwing Hudson into the mix as well. To be able to track how changes in the code base affects our unit tests.

First of all I want feedback on the above question. But I would appreciate any thoughts regarding handling versioning, bug tracking and their integration into Eclipse.

Answer 1

Vectrace offers Mercurial Eclipse. But, it doesn't sound finished.

For bug tracking, you may try Trac with TracMercurial.

Answer 2

Trac can sometimes be a pain to set up. Take a look at Redmine. I'd recommend installing TortoiseHg too.

Answer 3

I can't speak to Mercurial, but Mylyn is the unchallenged king of integrating Eclipse and various bug trackers. Regardless of how good your issue tracker's web interface may be, Mylyn makes it a lot easier to create, organize and (most importantly) work on incoming issues. It has excellent support for both Bugzilla and Trac. Its Jira support is a bit behind, but it's not bad. Additionally, there are a small horde of third-party plugins which add Mylyn support for various issue trackers (such as Mingle).

Answer 4

In my experience the MercurialEclipse plug-in works quite well - as far as I understood, nobody commenting here has actually used it, so don't base your decisions solely on those opinions. You'd probably be better off to test it yourself. As I said before - it works for me.

Disclaimer: I've participated in developing the plug-in...

Answer 5

Just in case anyone runs across this thread, I started using Mercurial kind of by accident when I discovered it was one of the 3 integrated version control systems in Netbeans.

I know this is an Eclipse thread, but for anyone not already settled in with Eclipse and looking at Mercurial for versioning the integration in Netbeans is really quite impressive.

It includes things like project level overlays (what's changed, have you committed, etc) but goes even further by adding direct highlighting in your code view (so I can see line-by-line what's been modified and what hasn't).

Definitely worth taking a look at if your not already set on using Eclipse (which is great too, but I don't think the versioning integration is comparable/yet anyway).

Answer 6

I can't say much about Netbeans, but I guess I can say something about Eclipse. Version control such as CVS is great in Eclipse, but I suppose support is a bit lagging in other types of version control.

As for changes, Eclipse also highlight what are the new changes that you have in the source code and it goes as far as providing you the local history of the files you are editing. Project level overlays are there in Ecipse, but you need to use some kind of version control system for that (CVS, Subversion, etc)