Mercurial, D/VCS non-versioned files

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Dear Richard, 

Did you already try teaching your designers to use TortoiseHG ( 
http://tortoisehg.sf.net )? 

It offers direct Explorer integration of Mercurial, and I even managed to 
teach it to someone who had never used his computer for more than Office 
stuff. 


If you can't go this way, giving them unversioned files and reversioning their 
changes is easy in Mercurial. Here's one example: 

Just create one clone for each designer and when they come back with their 
files put them into the workdir of the clone you prepared for them. 

There simply do a regular commit and then merge the changes from the main repo 
(merging is extremely easy in Mercurial, just pull the changes from the main 
repo and then do "hg merge"). If the merge succeeds, push the changes into the 
main repo. 

If you do this for every designer, you will have an always up-to-date, always 
working main repository, and you will have secured all of their changes. 

Also you can directly give the updated data in the clone to the designer who 
can then work on an up-to-date version of the files. 

There are plenty of other possible workflows you could use, but this one 
should work quite well, though with some manual work for you (copying over 
their files). 
It has the advantage of not giving the designers anything they can break, but 
the disadvantage of not giving them the power of real versiontracking (being 
able to go back whenever you want is quite useful). 

Besides: Even if they manage to break a Mercurial repository, they only break 
their local version. Your main repo is unaffected as long as they don't push 
to it (which you can avoid by always pulling changes from them as opposed to 
them pushing changes directly to the main repo). 


Best wishes, 
Arne

Am Mittwoch 17 Dezember 2008 20:54:14 schrieb Richard Lee:
> Dear Mercurial forum,
>
> I am a web developer who has to work with some designers who can't use
> version control.
>
> I currently use svn. Usually, the designers do their stuff then I do mine.
> Sometimes if the designers need to make changes, I give them the HEAD of
> the project. Unfortunately, by the time I've got it back some guys have
> stripped the meta data etc.
>
> Does Mercurial, any other DVCS or any other system deal with situations
> where you can "re-version" non-versioned files. I'm currently writing a
> python script for svn, but my boss said I was reinventing the wheel and
> perhaps there was a product out there that already does the job?
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Richard

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