Mercurial is my first serious foray into distributed version control systems (dvcs). When I started gathering my notes for this entry I knew that this would be a really negative review of Mercurial. The first version control system I actually liked was Perforce. Several years later I encountered Subversion, it took a while to adjust but eventually I grew really fond of it. For the past 3 months, I’ve been using Mercurial… definitely not impressed. Or so I thought, but as I looked through my cons, I saw pros all over the place. So here are my [not-so-negative-after-all] thoughts on using Mercurial!

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Configuration Management (CM) is crucial to any software project as neglecting it will easily get you in big trouble. It may look like bad luck, but it is not.

A CM-plan will deal with several matters, from simple to decide things, such as naming of releases to more advanced subjects, such as branching strategy. I will talk about the latter today.

There are of course different ideas about what a good branching strategy should be. It is my firm belief that it must be aligned with the subject at hand, namely changes.