Mercurial vs Subversion

Question

I have a medium sized team of developers who moved to Subversion last December from VSS and I wanted to hear from people who have used both Mercurial and Subversion and get their feedback.

What do they really like about Mercurial? What sucks? Is there a better open source tool? I didn't really want to put my devs through the whole source control migration thing again unless it is really worth it.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

See:

• Chapter 1 of HgInit (and read all the rest while you're at it)

• Version Control Blog: Comparison of Mercurial and Subversion (you can also compare pretty much any other SCM)

For the actual migration process, see How to migrate/convert from SVN to Mercurial on Windows.

Answer 2

The Python developers are contemplating a conversion from Subversion to a DVCS. In the PEP linked above, you can find a comparison of how to do various tasks in svn, bzr, hg and git and the PEP committee's reasons for choosing Mercurial.

Answer 3

Mercurial (like Git) is a D**VCS (meaning a **Decentralized Version Control System), which will allow you to:

• commit much more often, since you
  • don't need a remote server
  • can publish (push/pull) only the branches/commits that you want
• manage merges with lot less conflicts than Subversion (see Merge with Svn vs Git)

One downside is you need to rethink the way you organize your data: you cannot just put everything in one DVCS repo (because a tag would apply to the all repo even if it contains unrelated components), but you need to separate those data in coherent sub-sets.

Answer 4

The advantages of Subversion over Mercurial are:

• Subversion is simpler to understand.
• Subversion allows arbitrary metadata on files and tracks changes to it.
• Subversion is compiled.
• Subversion has been around longer.
• Subversion can store binary file deltas; Mercurial stores an entire copy with each change.

I think that's about it. Migrating from Subversion to Mercurial won't be nearly as hard as getting them to use version control in the first place.