Is a DVCS useful for one developer?

Question

Or would a conventional client-server VCS be more appropriate? I\'m currently using TortoiseSVN, but I\'m interested in a DVCS, but I\'m not sure if it\'s even a good idea to tr

Answer 1

Yes. There are two main reasons I switched to DVCS (Git and Mercurial) for my own hobby projects. First is the issue of keeping backups and the other is that I travel around a lot and use several geographically seperate computers.

Quick and Easy backup

I work with at least two repository clones. One is the obvious local one that is with my workspace, the other one is one I keep on my file server (or online repository such as github or bitbucket) that I will dump on whenever I'm finished with stuff locally. Making the backup is as simple as syncing the repositories, in other words pushing your changes upstream.

Work on different locations or computers

This is probably something that is less common scenario for developers with hobby projects because I tend to travel around. Aside from my computer at home I sometimes stay over at my parents where I keep my old computer (that is fashionably quick enough for hobby programming). Whenever I feel like hacking new features I can do it on that computer and then just sync repositories so I will receive those changes when I get back home.

Easy branching/merging

It is no secret that DVCS handles branching/merging quite automagically. Merge conflicts do happen, but even without those in a centralized version control tools, e.g. Subversion, doesn't really help out that much with merging even in simple scenarios. Even though I don't use this feature all that often for personal projects there are some developers that do.

I know one programming contractor that used git to keep track on his own work on a proprietary system at company who were still using SourceSafe for version control. Git made it easy for him to keep track of the seperate fixes by branching each fix even though he had to merge the files manually in the end. When the time came for him to check-in files to SourceSafe, he'd be looking at the diffs in the different branches to see what changes were needed and then do them. Lets just say that most of his time was spent on waiting for his peers to catch up.