Question

Here’s the deal:
I just started a new job, and source control here is basically useless.
All of the devs (about 10 guys) test their code in the same dev site, and there’s no way to test a change other than commiting the change to SVN, and then it automatically gets updated in the dev site. (Let’s not even start talking about the headaches when someone else breaks something, and you have to figure why your stuff is now not working….)

So instead of doing like Ctrl+S, and refreshing the browser to see my changes, you have to Ctrl+S, svn commit, refresh the page.
Of course since everyone has to do this a million times every day, there’s never any commit messages, so the svn history is useless.

Anyhow, since I’m the new guy, for now, for my own sanity, I want to use some other source control system locally, so that I can commit projects atomically, and be able to roll back easily.

Is it possible to use for example mercurial at the same time as svn?
I would use svn basically to see my changes, and mercurial to keep track of my changes.

Any alternative ideas are welcome too.
Thanks!

UPDATE-

Thanks for all the answers.
Unfortunately, none really suit me in this situation. Maybe I didn’t explain it right.
I don’t want sync between repos. What I need is to be able to have like two different repository checkouts living in the same place.
So if I do svn status I’m comparing against the regular company repo. But if I do hg status I’m comparing against my own personal repo to help me stay sane.
Thx guys

Answer 1

For Mercurial Stack Overflow has a guide which describes Subversion interaction choices in detail. There are three current methods: hg convert, hgsubversion, and hgsvn. See the guide for details.

(My own two cents is that hgsubversion doesn’t handle all repositories properly but, when it does, handles them very smoothly. When it doesn’t I’ve had some success with hgsvn.)

UPDATE:

You said:

“Thanks for all the answers. Unfortunately, none really suit me in this situation. Maybe I didn’t explain it right. I don’t want sync between repos. What I need is to be able to have like two different repository checkouts living in the same place. So if I do svn status I’m comparing against the regular company repo. But if I do hg status I’m comparing against my own personal repo to help me stay sane.”

Ah, I see. In simplest terms, yes. but you probably don’t want to. You can checkout from Subversion, manually copy over your .hg directory from your Mercurial tree, and run commands from each. You almost certainly want tosvn ignore the .hg* files and add **.svn to your .hgignore. But you don’t really want to do this unless the checkout is not being edited by you other than to occasionally svn update or hg pull from the original repositories. If you are also doing edits you will make a mistake and you will end up with something checked in to one or the other repository that you didn’t want there.

If I understand you correctly you would still benefit from using one of the Mercurial-Subversion bridges. You can for example quite easily with hgsubversion do hg status to compare with your local Mercurial repository, and hg svn status to compare to the remote Subversion repository. Even if you don’t sync, and you just compare your files to one repository and the other, it’s still much better to have a system that understands both, and won’t spill unwanted state from one VCS into the other.