Thread

I’ve started building up a deck geared towards organizations/individuals with little to no familiarity with version control systems or distributed version control systems like Mercurial.

I would love to get your opinions: Mercurial:// Beginners

Two points you might add:
- cheap branching (or the REAL power of SCM)
- offline work (no centralised server means you can work from anywhere even when no internet is available)

Simple enough concept for beginners to pick up, Nice presentation but a little short. I’m generally used to slideshow presentations around 40~60 slides. Thanks for sharing though.

- cheap branching (or the REAL power of SCM)

This is definitely something I want to touch on but I almost feel as if this should go into an “Intermediate” presentation. Branching is so powerful and can do so many things I could easily fill a whole deck discussing it alone; but, in my experience most users don’t dive into branching until they are relatively comfortable with the feature set of the tool.

- offline work (no centralised server means you can work from anywhere even when no internet is available)

Absolutely - this is one of the major selling points with a DVCS, just haven’t made it to building those slides yet.

- cheap branching (or the REAL power of SCM)

This is definitely something I want to touch on but I almost feel as if this should go into an “Intermediate” presentation. Branching is so powerful and can do so many things I could easily fill a whole deck discussing it alone; but, in my experience most users don’t dive into branching until they are relatively comfortable with the feature set of the tool.

You might not explain the full featured tool set that is branching but I think it’s such an important part of SCM, that you should at least mention it. It is one of the biggest selling points for SCM. Change management can be done the ‘old fashioned way’ by a couple of diffs and someone in charge of releases, but branching is something unique to SCM.

The ability to ‘test-drive’ a new feature, add it if it is satisfactory, or scrap it when it’s not needed, without breaking any of your stable code, is a very powerful tool. It allows developers to ‘experiment’ with their code, without actually affecting it.

I think branching is an essential part in ‘enlightening’ the ones who don’t use a SCM yet. While branching is a PITA in SVN/CVS, it’s a breeze in modern SCM’s like git and mercurial, and it is highly recommended to use them as such.

One of my favourite features of branching is having several ‘versions’ (dev/test/ua/live) of your code in your local repo so you can develop in parallel and using your branches as a workflow/deployment mechanism. You can read more about it in this excellent article about a git workflow