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Continuous Check-Ins with Mercurial

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Feb 16, 2011

Sections
Process & Practices,
Architecture & Design,
Development
Topics
.NET ,
Programming ,
Research ,
Agile ,
Source Control

One of the major benefits of a distributed version control systems is that each user gets their own versioned workspace. Leon Bambrick is experimenting with continuous check-ins, where in each successful build also triggers a check-in. He writes,

This is clever because it means that every tiny change you make is tracked. And it's stupid for the same reason. The main reason it's stupid is that it means every time something has changed you are asked to enter a commit note in a notepad.

It's quite annoying at first. But soon you get into the spirit of it. You realize that it is making you act in a more mindful manner. You are concentrating on every build, more aware of what you are doing, and better focused on your tasks.

For more on how he setup Mercurial within Visual Studio and his thoughts on the experiment see his post titled Mercurial workflow for personal projects.

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1 comment

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clever idea by Chris Sutton Posted

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    clever idea

    by Chris Sutton

    The idea is clever as Leon noted, but that is far too tight of a check-in cycle. The commit messages will be too fine grained. Or maybe I would adapt to building less often.

    I do many intermediate builds that wouldn't make for logical check-ins. I think it would be more interesting to trigger the check-in when your test suite passes.

    Reply