Hi, I'm ThadeusB.

I have completed converting all of my subversion projects to mercurial repositories.

I used Sam Hart's guide located here: http://ww2.samhart.com/node/49

The conversion process was fairly painless, I wrote a bash script to automate the whole process. I also have the security that I was looking for. Having the repository readable over HTTP but only allowing push/commit over SSH.

You can find all of my projects at hg.thadeusb.com

After using mercurial for a couple of days I have a couple of reservations about the conversion.

First of all, switching to mercurial did not have the "WOW" factor I was expecting from switching. This leads me to believe that there is alot of "hype" surrounding mercurial, when in reality it is not as great as everyone says it is.

I have yet to see anything about mercurial that makes me say "I'm glad I switched". Honestly I was just as happy with subversion, and the PROs for converting are made null by the CONs.

First off, I admire the beauty in not having my source code littered with .svn directories. This in and of it self is enough to stay with mercurial even though none of the other mercurial promises were fufilled.

The first big issue I have with mercurial is limited Visual Studio support. The mercurial plugin for HG is buggy, and requires TortoiseHG installed ( which I dislike TortoiseHG/SVN, it is yet another explorer.exe bloatware ) for cloning new repositories. There is no built in diff viewer for the Visual Studio plugin. However Netbeans support for mercurial is awesome.

The second thing I dislike about mercurial is the misconception of it being faster that subversion. In all of my tests on both Ubuntu and Windows, subversion actually out performed mercurial in everything except commits. ( since mercurial commits are done on the hard drive). Subversion is faster in pushing changes over SSH, working with diffs, checking a repository out, by a factor of at least 2x.

That being said. I have not had a single issue with mercurial and renaming/deleting folders. In my earlier post I wrote how subversion breaks on me if I delete a file without using the proper subversion commands makes mercurial worth it.

I think I will be staying with mercurial, mainly because I don't have much to gain or lose by using one or the other. The trade outs for each make either system applicable to what I do.