[Process] Distributed Source Code Management and Branching

I am using Mercurial a lot recently (and love it); I really do wonder, why I struggled so long with Subversion. When I first heard the GIT presentation from Linus Torvalds (which is, hm, very entertaining) the whole distributed SCM thing sounded very esotheric for me. However I decided to give it a try, also motivated by the great Chaosradio Express 130 Podcast (German). Yet, I decided to go with Mercurial and not Git; allthough this created some flame-wars within our group, because one of my colleagues is a big Git fan. So be it ;-)

For me Mercurial is a great, easy to install, and pretty easy to understand system. The commandline is really straightforward and the help-texts well written (and interestingly - internationalised). Maybe I follow up another blog post with more details to Mercurial another time.

As easy branching and merging are among the main advantages of the new distributed SCMs, I want to recommend for now the very nice blog-post by Steve Losh "A Guide to Branching in Mercurial". This article provides a good and conclusive introduction to different methods for creating branches with Mercurial and also explains differences to Git and some of it's shortcomings (*g*).

p.s.: For my taste, just one thing is missing: some details on merging.
p.p.s.: Please no comments on my "Git shortcomings" statement, they will be censored out anyway ;-)