bazaar, Mercurial, darcs

Update 16/01:

• bazaar: merge problem solved, see the next post.
• Mercurial: found a way to query changes.

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I played with Mercurial and darcs on the weekend. Environment: win32, python 2.5, console + sh from MSYS.

My observations:


darcs

Pros:

• I really liked the interactive style of workflow.
  
• It gave me enough informations about what I needed.
• Merging was easy.
• I's really cool.
  

Cons:

• They were too creative during the command naming. Almost totally new command set is not a deal breaker, but uncool.
• I's strange that the latest available windows binary is not the latest stable version. However It is possible to download the latest binary from an external site.
• Hard to extend.
  

What makes it totally unusable for me: WindowsConsoles

During the evaluation I got several error messages complaining about my console being out of sync.
I will try to overcome on this somehow. Maybe disabling the interactive features makes it possible to use it, or just use the cmd.exe.


Mercurial

It is similar to bazaar.

Pros:

• More fine grained control than in bazaar (pull/update/merge are separate steps).
• Merge is more easy than in bazaar (easy to configure external diffs).
• Written in python, easy to extend.

Cons:

• Installation from the sources is working well, but the windows binary installer is trying to install the msvcrt71.dll into the windows/system32. This is totally unacceptable.
  
  

What makes it totally unusable for me: I weren't able to query file status changes between two branches. If I would like to see what changes I have made, I have to query the changes from the upstream's repository and specify my working branch in a parameter. It's logical but not practical.


bazaar

Pros:

• Written in python, easy to extend.
• Provides every information what I need. Easy to query changes between branches.
• Easy to install, working well with my my console.
  

Cons:

• Merging is not too user friendly. On conflict it just put the 3 versions to the filesystem, and you have to do the merging manually. (darcs and mercurial provides nice way to define a merge tool)