I, personally, believe it's up to a user to decide which version control system works best for them.
Both git and mercurial can talk to "non-native" remote servers.
IIRC mercurial can talk to subversion and git (with hg-git).
Git can talk to subversion, cvs, perforce, mercurial (there are multiple tools for the latter, and I'm the author of one of them), bzr, and maybe others.
If things don't work smoothly in any of those cross-VCS configurations, my belief is that issues should be filed and fixed.
Agree. However, large enterprises usually have common compliance/access control policies, something not easily implemented across multiple VCS (unless there's a full-fledged internal development team dedicated to that).
Working in a big firm adds overhead, yet has certain benefits (resources, etc.). That's a whole different topic though.
@e12e Try RhodeCode (https://rhodecode.com), we have quite a few educational users (e.g. Carnegie Mellon University) using RhodeCode in the way you described. RhodeCode also has secure authorization, user permission management and a web interface. One can even edit/commit directly from within a built-in web editor.
Is it Free/open source software and does it work off-line (on lan with sometimes intermittent Internet connection and/or can clients commit while offline, eg on a train journey with many tunnels[1], or on an airplane)?
[1] "The construction was exceptionally challenging, at high altitudes in a region without roads and with a climate that saw many meters of snow in the winter and temperatures far below freezing. 113 tunnels, totaling 28 kilometres (17 mi) had to be built; the longest being the 5,311 metres (17,425 ft) Gravehalsen Tunnel, alone costing NOK 3 million and the longest tunnel north of the Alps. It took six years to build, and had to be excavated manually through solid gneiss."
Couldn't agree more. In RhodeCode (https://rhodecode.com) we use Pull Requests with a voting system. Interested reviewers are added automatically, depending on the repository and the changes being made.
RhodeCode is self-hosted, but you can run it in Azure/Amazon cloud. For large companies, that setup might prove even more stable than relying on someone else's cloud [1]
@dvdgsng We're better than ever, thanks! I don't know if you heard, RhodeCode CE is now free and open source. Feel free to join our Slack: https://rhodecode.com/join
We'll be rolling out a major release next week, might be the right time to spread a word to colleagues ;)
It could have been the motto of RhodeCode (https://rhodecode.com). Self-hosted repository management not only has a benefit of having one's uptime under control, but also is much more secure.
@zardeh Totally agree in that adding friction is bad. At Rhodecode, we tried to eliminate it, by creating a dedicated page for contributors (https://rhodecode.com/open-source) and allowing to login via GitHub / BitBucket.
One more point: although the contributions are not made for the recognition alone, a bit of it never hurts. We ended up with a badge system for https://community.rhodecode.com , where code contributors get rights to moderate discussions (since they ARE the core users of RhodeCode).
Some companies even have Git, Mercurial, and SVN, working all together under centralized repository management.