Audit options with Mercurial

David Bainbridge david.bainbridge at gmail.com
Sun Jan 23 09:30:49 CST 2011


On 23 January 2011 16:00, pallikkattil <pallikkattil at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Unfortunately harvest is not at all developer friendly and causes lot of
> issues with parallel development and code merging. From a developer
> perspective it is not efficient but from a management, security and auditing
> side it is a great tool. Improvement in developer productivity and DVCS
> capabilities are the main reasons why we are looking to switch to Mercurial.

This is something I am wrestling with too ... Developers like using
DVCS (whether Git or Mercurial) but there is a gut feeling in
management that if such systems are used then the security, auditing
and so on, will be less efficient or even completely absent.

These issues are not where developers are coming from but they are an
important part of running a software business these days. While we are
at it let's throw export control into the mix and requirements for
logging when stuff crosses national borders.

Developers want something that is fast, that integrates with their
development environment, and allows them to work unhindered by network
disruptions. DVCS does all of this for them.

While there is no doubt that the DVCS paradigm is good, and that it is
very suitable for globally distributed development, the fact that
these tools come from the open source world - and are in themselves
open source - means that some aspects of running a multinational
corporation have not been considered ;-)

I see DVCS as being positive. I now have developers saying that they
WANT to do Source Code Management - but not using the tool that
management want them to! This is progress compared to a few years ago
when there was resistance to doing SCM at all ... It's all progress
;-)

In my case it's not Harvest - it's ClearCase. But I can recognise all
the same areas of concern.

The first DVCS that shows itself to be enterprise-ready out of the
box, with credible ways of addressing management concerns, will
suddenly find that they have large scale company-wide adoptions backed
by management on their hands!

/Dave


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