DVCS for a small company of remote employees

Question

Here's the situation: at my small office, because we like to keep mobile and occasionally work from home, instead of having a central file server, we have all the office documents in an SVN repository, and each person keeps a checkout on their own laptops. A checkout weighs in at about 3GB, and the repo with revisions in it: about 6GB. This is all working great.

The problem is that soon we won't have a small office any more - all our 5 workers will be working remotely. I had considered purchasing a dedicated server and running our SVN repository from that, except two of our workers will be really remote and will be using wireless "broadband" with a 3GB/month limit, and I'm afraid that a few large updates will really rip through their monthly allowance, not to mention taking all day to complete.

Reading a few questions on Stack Overflow, it seems there's quite a community of distributed VCS aficionados who think git or mercurial is definitely the best for many situations. Given that all the employees would still be able to meet face-to-face at least once a fortnight (and hence be on a fast LAN), I'm wondering if a DVCS would work for us?

Answer 1

(It seems no one is answering this.) DVCS of course seems like it would work, but I have no experience with it. A centralized system like svn might also work if you are not expecting large changes daily. (to go up and back from the server) The initial get in that case would be the only real expensive issue.

Can you monitor your use now and see how much traffic goes back and forth?

The real problem here is the 3GB/mo bandwidth limitation. It's probably just better to come up with a better solution for connectivity...

Answer 2

I don't know exactly what's in your repo, but unless you're changing all the files regularly, a DVCS should provide you a very desirable workflow.

You could do an svn -> git conversion, stick the repo on a DVD and mail it out to all the satellite offices, and then let them fetch from the office as things change at a fairly low incremental cost (should be smaller than the delta in general).

Answer 3

Checkout the Fossil DVCS, it may fit your bill. Fossil may be used like SVN or a DVCS. If you are concerned about it handling your current repository try it out. It also has a built in project wiki and bug tracking system that distribute with the repository as well. You could try it out and see if it would work for your small team.

The pain for you would be losing your revision history, at this time I don't beleive you can import a svn repository into Fossil.

Join the mailing list and you will get answers for any of your questions. The creator of SQLite is also the creator of this project as well. Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I can't see why not. With something like git, the repository is local to the machine, and so your remote employees can actually have a tracked changelog that can then be merged or rebased with the main repository--whatever you decide that to be--when they get the chance.

Also, git has really good compression compared to SVN, so the 3GB/mo quota may be more than enough for your remote employees.

Randal Schwartz actually gave a really good presentation on git at Google's Tech Talks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhZ9BXQgc4