Redmine + Mercurial

Tags: Mercurial, Redmine, Updates
Posted in Site

Well, in the spirit of change, I have decided to move my source control to Mercurial and my project management to Redmine.  The decision to switch from Trac to Redmine was a simple one.  Redmine offers more features out of the box than Trac:

• Provides a cleaner backend (Ruby MVC).
• It allows me to have one instance of Redmine for all of my projects (and subprojects)
• Inbuilt time tracking and a robust ticketing system.
• Cleaner, more usable interface.
• Support for a variety of SCM systems, including Mercurial out of the box.
• Never have to touch a configuration file – its all done on the site itself.

The decision to switch from SVN to Mercurial was a little harder to justify.  This was not all that easy of a decision, because the whole concept of DVCS is not all that beneficial.  My main inspiration for switching was offline commits.  That is I can commit local changes to my code, outlining and documenting every step I take.  Whereas with SVN is was reluctant to commit as often because of it’s centralized nature and fear of breaking something.  Another cool idea here is that I don’t need internet to commit code, so I can work offline without causing problems with tracking my code.  Mercurial also seems to have a better merging algorithm, which probably stems from the fact it is distributed instead of centralized.  Hg expects you to need to resolve conflicts and makes it easy to do so.  The final thing is almost purely cosmetic.  Mercurial has a nice web based interface out of the box.  It also comes packaged with CGI scripts that you can pop into HTTPd pretty effortlessly.  Pushes and pulls are done via the web interface, which is nice.  That being said, SVN can do revision control using HTTP as well, with the help of mod_dav_svn.  It is trickier to set up by far compared to Hg’s method however.

And that my friends is the update!