Looking for advice on setting up a test repository

[Martin Geisler]

Raghuram Devarakonda <draghuram at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> We use Subversion at our company and are finding the merge process
> between branches a not too pleasant experience. As I have heard a lot
> recently about a DVCS being much better for merging, I thought I would
> set up a hg repository to mirror our current Subversion one so that I
> can test merge in both Subversion and hg and compare.

Well, if there is a conflicts between the two branches, then both
Subversion and Mercurial will need your help to resolve it. Mercurial
cannot magically merge better than Subversion, except when you run into
bugs in Subversion:

  http://mercurial.aragost.com/kick-start/tasks.html#merging-renamed-files-in-subversion

In my opinion, the thing that makes merges easier in Mercurial is that
you merge often. Frequent merges ensures that the merges are small and
thus easier to resolve. Mercurial also has the full information about
what has and has not been merged.

Subversion also tracks merge information these days, but it requires you
to use different commands depending on the direction of the merge. This
makes merges a bit more complicated. I asked in #mercurial, and people
told me that they have had problems with conflicts in the SVN merge info
itself, something which should of course not happen...

> The Subversion repository has a trunk and few branches from the trunk.
> Some of the branches are for development while others are release
> branches. Is it possible to set up a hg repo structure mimicking this
> set up? If so, I would appreciate it if some one can briefly explain
> the procedure to do so. If it makes any difference, I would be trying
> this on Linux.

Give the hgsubversion extension a try, it will let you convert from
Subversion to Mercurial:

  http://bitbucket.org/durin42/hgsubversion/wiki/Home
  http://mercurial.aragost.com/kick-start/hgsubversion.html

-- 
Martin Geisler

aragost Trifork
Professional Mercurial support
http://aragost.com/mercurial/