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I’m so sick and tired of Subversion! A couple of days ago our repository server was down which caused the f… stupid svn client to hang. Not even pressing Ctrl-C would stop it. In the end I had to kill it the hard way. This obviously messed up the svn locks. You should think that they had implemented a timeout and sensible error message by 2009? And don’t even get me started on all those .svn directories laying around!

Anyway, this finally pushed me to have a look at alternatives. I’ve been wanting to try out Mercurial for some time now and this pushed me over the edge. My first impression is really good! I obviously have to spend some time getting used to the distributed model, but it seems like it might be worth it. Everything was looking rose red until I figured out that it doesn’t support tracking of empty folders!? It does make sense when I think about their architecture built up around sha1 sums, but I still think that it’s strange. I often create a directory structure before I start coding. The workaround seems to be creating empty files inside each folder, which sounds a little annoying to me.

That’s it for now. Man it felt good to shout and scream a little about Subversion!