Distributed Version Control “killer applications”

Question

Considering switching to Mercurial or Git? We are too. I\'m currently studying the benefits of DVCS which turn out to be vast, lust and must.

I would love to hear f

Answer 1

Sharing changes with others without publishing

For me the killer app, when I was a large team, was being able to work together with other engineers, sharing changes, without needing to go through the central server. It meant we could share unfinished features in a controlled way (i.e. no "copy this file from my tree") and it all just worked.

• Alice starts work on a feature, but it needs Bob to do some stuff before release.
• Bob takes Alice's changes directly, finishes off the feature. Alice and Bob might have stuff going back and forth between them.
• Charlie, the QA guy, takes Bob and Alice's changes from one of them. Tests them. They're ok! He pushes the whole lot onto the main server. Everybody else can now get the feature - complete and tested.