The Survey Project Source Code Repository was moved from Subversion to Mercurial (Distributed source control management system). The change was made to better support the joint development from a central shared repository. Access to the Survey Project Repository will be restriced to SP Development projectmembers only.
Subversion versus Mercurial
Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Unlike Subversion, DVCS has a very different model for collaborating on an open source project.
- In DVCS, you do not check in and out changes. You check in and out the entire set of changes (aka the repository).
- To get started, you first make a local copy of the repository, or clone the repository. In TFS speak, this is the equivalent of getting the entire history (source code + metadata) of each and every change set in source control. It is literally making a copy of everything you see in the CodePlex source control. Since you are copying the entire repository, there isn’t a notion of “checking out”.
- In DVCS, you commit to the local repository, and push your changes back to CodePlex.
- Since you have your own repository, you “check in” by committing to your local repository. Once you’ve committed locally, you can “check in” those changes back to CodePlex by pushing those changes. Hence the term “check in” doesn’t apply because it is overloaded in the DVCS context.
Using Mercurial Step by Step (note: some of the instructions are outdated e.g. HG Repository Explorer = Workbench):
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeplex/archive/2010/01/22/using-mercurial-on-codeplex.aspx
- http://codeplex.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Using%20TortoiseHG%20with%20CodePlex&referringTitle=Source%20control%20clients
To download and install the Mercurial client for windows on you computer: http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
Further instructions/ guidelines on how work on the new repository will follow soon.