Until the last PHP conference I attended (the PHP benelux conference 2010) I used an normal Windows XP installation with a Zend Server CE installation on it at home, and yeah it worked. At the office we already used versioning, bug tracking and some other Joel points. I could see the advantages clearly, even if I was developing on my own at home but I just couldn’t find time and motivation to start converting my home server to something more serious. That is until I attended a track on the Joel test of lornajane. (Slides are available here). I thought it would be a nice idea to keep my Windows installation on the server during this adventure to pass the Joel test.
The first step: setting up a versioning system.
I chose Mercurial not because I think it’s the best, not because it’s the easiest one but just because I didn’t know anything about it yet. (and maybe a little bit because I already saw it had a prepackaged version for Windows)
Installing Mercurial was really easy it only take like 3 minutes before everything was running and I had my first repository created. I could explain what I did but actually I just followed this manual can’t get much easier then that. Because I use Netbeans as my main IDE I could start working right away, Netbeans as build in Mercurial support.
One thing I really liked about my Windows pc at work is that has Tortoise SVN installed for repobrowsing and a lot more. Now Tortoise SVN is not an option when using Mercurial, but hey there is a good alternative called Tortoise HG.
Because I mainly use OSX at home I also installed Mercurial on my Mac, again, it worked immediately.
I must say setting up a versioning system can’t get much easier then this, I expected a lot hassle but it all went very smooth, thumbs up for Mercurial!