A Generic Cloud Repository as a Mercurial Repository

[Lester Caine]

Martin Geisler wrote:
> Pietro Moras<studio-pm at hotmail.com>  writes:
>
>>> >>Jungle Disk as a remote repository for Mercurial ...
>> >
>> >       This
>> >is precisely the kind of VCS collaborative web-configuration I,
>> >perhaps naively, considered as desirable. And, at least in this
>> >notable case, there it is.
>> >
>> >Ever heard of any other such encouraging experiences? Thanks.
> It is clear that you can synchronize a Mercurial repository using
> DropBox, Jungle Disk, a network filesystem, rsync, or whatever other
> preferred mechanism you might have for moving bits and bytes from one
> computer to another.
>
> However, doing so is often*dangerous*  (you can corrupt a repository if
> you edit it from two computers at the same time) and goes against the
> *basic design*  of distributed version control systems. DVCS rely on the
> idea that you bring the source code to you (download it only your
> machine) so gain quick access to the history and (importantly) work in
> isolation and thereby create your own branch.

The original concept of the cloud was - I thought - a bit like the old screen 
saver programs that used to use spare computing power to process raw data for 
various projects. When you had a job that needed more computing power than you 
had locally one could buy time on a distributed system to process that. The idea 
that websites can be hosted on that distributed system and you only pay for 
'time' when a site is accessed does seem a little strange, but data storage 'in 
the cloud' does seem to be going a step too far. If one has to move data to a 
location where it can be used, then what is the point, but more important IS the 
aspect of multiple users accessing the same data. I don't feel safe relying on 
any system where you have no idea where the data is stored, and no control over 
how it is accessed. 'Shared drives' need something like hg running LOCALLY to 
ensure that you are seeing the latest version of every file in a project.

Hg *IS* a cloud system already as we all host our own copies of the data. Even 
if the main store goes down, the whole database can be rebuilt from the 
distributed copies. So the question is fundamentally flawed since Mercurial is 
already a cloud based system :)

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk