Mercurial for not-software projects

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 4:46 AM, Pietro Moras <studio-pm at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not personally aware of any, [...]
>
> Fine so, dear Eric,
>    That's all I needed to know. Thanks.
> - P.M.

I have a few additional examples:

- Tracking (word and ppt) documents that are being modified by several people:

Some of my colleagues used to have a shared network folder were the
placed documentation that they were working on. They would often have
problems were people would overwrite each other's changes. They
decided to create a mercurial repository instead, and work on it.
This solution is not perfect but is much better than what they did
before. They are now able to tell when they have diverged. Using
TortoiseHg which can open Microsoft Office's Word diff tool they can
tell what they need to merge.
An alternative would be to use a centralized VCS that let them lock
the files, but then they would not be able to work on the files in
parallel. It would also have been harder to setup and they would have
needed to learn how to use a new tool.

- Tracking Microsoft Access database files:

Another team had a similar problem as the one above, but instead of
word documents they had to track (unfrequent) changes to (small)
Microsoft Access Database files. I made a small db2json tool that is
able to read the database contents and dump it into json files, which
it can then diff. I helped them configure TortoiseHg to call this tool
when diffing files and now they are able to track the changes to those
files. I plan to publish this tool in bitbucket one of these days...

- Keeping track of what files have been changed on the firmware of a
shared prototype:

We have a prototype of of one of our products on our lab. This
prototype is used by several teams to test their changes to the device
firmware. This requires modifying files in the device file system. In
the past people would sometimes have problems running their tests
because they did not realize that some other team had changed one of
the firmware modules. Our solution is to create a mercurial
repository, which lets us know when there are modified files (compared
to the baseline). We can also go back to a previous version that we
know was working fine, etc.

Cheers,

Angel