Oh well. We lost.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Looks like the development team at work has decided to go with a
subversion setup for our new source control environment.  That won't be
too bad an outcome, but I was working to sell them Mercurial, and
apparently didn't do it well enough.

The fact that our release engineering work was going to involve a
collection of extensions (mq, record, transplant, rebase) worked against
Mercurial; I don't seem to have managed to sell the power this gives
sufficiently clearly.  It just sounded complicated.

The lack of central locking control was judged to be a deal-breaker (very
complex text file maintained through GUI tools, manual merges have caused
us days of trouble in the past), and my locking code didn't quite sell
(mostly, I think, because I hadn't gotten it to the point of testing with
the Visual Studio plugin to see exactly what I could get to work;
Subversion and the Ankh plugin will flag a file as needing to be checked
out when your first try to edit it in VS.

There was also a general miasma of fear of the unknown going around. 
Charts showing Subversion to be the most widely used version control
seemed to be leaped upon with considerable relief.

Despite our currently having programmers in three widely-separated
locations, I couldn't get people to see the benefits of a distributed VCS
in each of our daily activities.

Everybody but me thought, in the end, that Subversion would be a better
choice for the team, though one developer thought he personally would be
happier with Mercurial.

I don't know if I'll continue and develop the current hook code plus
locking CGI into an actual Mercurial extension; I do have some feelings
about how to do it right the next time around, and it's an opportunity to
dive into Mercurial more.  On the other hand, then I'd have the perfect
solution for work, and couldn't use it.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info