More Caveats and Features

I have run across some other interesting things in my testing that I would like to point out:

• Using shared repositories with bzr on Windows, I have run into some interesting locking issues; namely, bzr locks the repository and then waits on its own lock.

• Using bzr-svn, you can only clone the root of a repository. This kind of makes sense, but is annoying. UPDATE: The author of bzr-svn set me straight. bzr-svn has this notion of branching schemes that may require you to specify additional parameters if the svn repository doesn't use the standard trunk/branches/tags layout.

• Using hgsvn, the working copy that results will be both an hg repository and a subversion working copy. Therefore, the following workflow should work:

  1. Import a subversion repository using hgimportsvn and hgpullsvn

  2. Make changes and version-control them with hg

  3. Submit changes back to subversion repository with svn

Continuing my ramblings on the differences between these systems, I must say that bzr's command set is very close to subversion. hg, on the other hand, has a decidedly different workflow.

I realized that I didn't comment on git in my last post. While this is yet another option, it is only supported on Windows under cygwin (yuck!), so I won't be trying it.