What are your coolest/most unusual hacks using a distributed version control system?

Question

I have been working with git for a few months and I find that most of the things that have transformed my everyday work for the better can be attributed to the flexibility and lack of enforced default policy in a distributed VCS.

Quite a few people seem to have felt the same way and have built upon this kind of flexibility

• I have read quite a few reports from users synchronizing their home directories across different machines.
• IkiWiki is built upon source control and it can be used as a distributed wiki.
• A few distributed bug/issue tracking systems exist that build upon git (not sure about others DVCSs).

What are some cool ideas you have implemented using your favorite DVCS?

Answer 1

i implemented a simple wiki on top of mercurial

my main gripe with wikis on any dvcs is merging,
as it indeed makes much sense to work in terms of pages when editing a wiki,
however all dvcs's are based on trees of files

btw, bzr's exposed directory based cherry picking doesn't get that right
(it mainly makes up the base for merge conflicts later)

Answer 2

Not my own projects, but just came across a couple of distributed issue tracking systems that use git:

git-issues
ticgit

And there's always fossil, which is a DVCS with both bug tracking and wiki built in. Made by the creator of sqlite, and uses an sqlite database as its repository.

Answer 3

Although I prefer Mercurial to git, I like Gist snippet service of the github.com. It's a paste site on steroids - allows to version snippets, access private snippets via SSL, and more.

Answer 4

I use mercurial for incremental backups to non-mercurial aware online file storage. Just have a repo that contains what's already backed up, and hg bundle against it. Then push. Copy the bundle to a live mesh synced folder and presto, automatic backup and distribution to all my machines. (Note: encrypt the bundle first - I trust no one to respect my privacy). Of course, full backup is just as easy with hg bundle -all.