Thanks to Dave Dribin, and his analysis of git vs. Mercurial, I decided to give Mercurial a try.

It turns out I rather like it! I’d been keeping a lot of my work in Subversion, which is a pretty good centralized source code management system, but the usual way of using it seemed so heavy: branches and tags and all kinds of operations took big URLs.

Don’t get me wrong. Subversion has a lot going for it in environments where development is managed, and central control is a plus. I haven’t, for instance, thought of a way that Mercurial could protect a repository against ad-hoc changes from a developer the way a UID/GID protected repository in SVN can.

Mercurial has a nice localized workflow. hg init, and hg add and hg commit, and my stuff is version-controlled, no need to find/make/design a Subversion repo.

It wasn’t that hard to set up Mercurial for nice web browsing, with decent log and diff displays. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the checkins. On-the-fly creation of tarballs is included, just turn them on with a config option. And I didn’t have to install any extra software to do it.

So, as a good start, iTunesBridged is in the repository. And there’s a new Source link in the menu at the top of the page.

Now, I can get on to some of the other neat things I’m working on.