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I've been using Git for version control for all of my own personal projects as a sole developer. I've heard that Mercurial and Git are very similar, and your r

I've been using Git for version control for all of my own personal projects as a sole developer. I've heard that Mercurial and Git are very similar, and your reasoning for choosing Mercurial is very similar to my own choice of Git :-) I like Git because I can easily track changes, see what I've done since the last time I commit (which is pretty often), and also keep separate branches for different sets of functionality without crossing over. I do mostly web development, so I will often start working on a new feature or a big change, only to be pulled off to fix a bug or add a smaller, more urgent feature, and push those live before finally getting back on track and finishing up. Using Git branches for all of those separate trains of thought helps me to keep things straight, and to be able to move quickly and easily between them. As far as disciplining yourself to continually check into version control, maybe I'm too paranoid, but I used to always find myself creating copies of files before making big changes to them, just to be safe, or commenting out code instead of deleting it, because I might need to reference it again. Once I started using version control I broke myself of those coding habits, now I delete when something needs to be deleted, I overhaul files when they need overhauling, and commit regularly enough that if I ever need to look back at or restore a previous version of a file I can do so easily (and with date/time stamps!) Also, because I'm building a business around my software, it's nice to know that if/when I bring on other developers I will have a long history of the work I've done. Good luck!

hypr_geek 15y ago
I've been using Git for version control for all of my own personal projects as a sole developer. I've heard that Mercurial and Git are very similar, and your reasoning for choosing Mercurial is very similar to my own choice of Git :-) I, too, thought about using git and github to host my code, but then found that github is free for open-source projects only and the generally accepted notion looked like git was more powerful but required more time to learn. This also lead to me try out Mercurial. And the tutorials at http://www.hginit.com http://www.hginit.com really made it look easy to get into. As far as disciplining yourself to continually check into version control, maybe I'm too paranoid, but I used to always find myself creating copies of files before making big changes to them, just to be safe, or commenting out code instead of deleting it, because I might need to reference it again. This is exactly I am (almost) right now. My code has a lot of previous code I've just commented instead of deleting, just because I thought I might need them again, or the new code wont work. Like, when I'm trying to do the same thing using more optimized solution. I guess using version control helps me get out of this habit. :) Thanks for your reply. :)

hypr_geek 15y ago

I've been using Git for version control for all of my own personal projects as a sole developer. I've heard that Mercurial and Git are very similar, and your reasoning for choosing Mercurial is very similar to my own choice of Git :-) I, too, thought about using git and github to host my code, but then found that github is free for open-source projects only and the generally accepted notion looked like git was more powerful but required more time to learn. This also lead to me try out Mercurial. And the tutorials at http://www.hginit.com http://www.hginit.com really made it look easy to get into. As far as disciplining yourself to continually check into version control, maybe I'm too paranoid, but I used to always find myself creating copies of files before making big changes to them, just to be safe, or commenting out code instead of deleting it, because I might need to reference it again. This is exactly I am (almost) right now. My code has a lot of previous code I've just commented instead of deleting, just because I thought I might need them again, or the new code wont work. Like, when I'm trying to do the same thing using more optimized solution. I guess using version control helps me get out of this habit. :) Thanks for your reply. :)