Help needed with workflow

[Pierre Asselin]

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> [ ... ]
> Being afraid of merging often is usually a habit from systems that make
> merging a huge pain (like CVS does quite often).  In Mercurial merges are
> much much easier, so you shouldn't be *afraid* of them.

I hear that a lot, but... when in svn or CVS you are told to update
before you can commit, that *is* a merge, and it is completely
routine.

I have no real experience with Mercurial yet, but I see a danger
where it is so easy to work on your private branch that you become
isolated and face a bigger integration burden when you finally try
to push.  An antidote to that is the will and discipline to pull
and merge often.  (Merge the from newly pulled tip to your work in
progress, I would assume.)


> A pull & merge cycle takes a few seconds when there are no conflicts.  If
> you pull and merge from the `central' repository often enough, there are
> very few changes to merge and a small (or non-existent) number of hard to
> resolve conflicts.

Right, like that.  Merge often, like in svn and CVS.  Except that Mercurial
lets you commit locally before you merge, so you have a safety net that is
lacking in svn and CVS.  (Well, they leave backups of your originals when
the update fails, but Mercurial's update --clean is more convenient.)


-- 
pa at panix dot com