diff en/ch00-preface.xml @ 749:7e7c47481e4f

Oops, this is the real merge for my hg's oddity

--- a/en/ch00-preface.xml	Fri Mar 20 15:40:06 2009 +0800
+++ b/en/ch00-preface.xml	Fri Mar 20 16:43:35 2009 +0800
@@ -1,45 +1,162 @@
 <!-- vim: set filetype=docbkxml shiftwidth=2 autoindent expandtab tw=77 : -->
 
 <preface id="chap.preface">
+  <?dbhtml filename="preface.html"?>
   <title>Preface</title>
 
-  <para>Distributed revision control is a relatively new territory,
-    and has thus far grown due to people's willingness to strike out
-    into ill-charted territory.</para>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Why revision control? Why Mercurial?</title>
+
+    <para id="x_6d">Revision control is the process of managing multiple
+      versions of a piece of information.  In its simplest form, this
+      is something that many people do by hand: every time you modify
+      a file, save it under a new name that contains a number, each
+      one higher than the number of the preceding version.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_6e">Manually managing multiple versions of even a single file is
+      an error-prone task, though, so software tools to help automate
+      this process have long been available.  The earliest automated
+      revision control tools were intended to help a single user to
+      manage revisions of a single file.  Over the past few decades,
+      the scope of revision control tools has expanded greatly; they
+      now manage multiple files, and help multiple people to work
+      together.  The best modern revision control tools have no
+      problem coping with thousands of people working together on
+      projects that consist of hundreds of thousands of files.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_6f">The arrival of distributed revision control is relatively
+      recent, and so far this new field has grown due to people's
+      willingness to explore ill-charted territory.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_70">I am writing a book about distributed revision control
+      because I believe that it is an important subject that deserves
+      a field guide. I chose to write about Mercurial because it is
+      the easiest tool to learn the terrain with, and yet it scales to
+      the demands of real, challenging environments where many other
+      revision control tools buckle.</para>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Why use revision control?</title>
+
+      <para id="x_71">There are a number of reasons why you or your team might
+	want to use an automated revision control tool for a
+	project.</para>
 
-  <para>I am writing a book about distributed revision control because
-    I believe that it is an important subject that deserves a field
-    guide. I chose to write about Mercurial because it is the easiest
-    tool to learn the terrain with, and yet it scales to the demands
-    of real, challenging environments where many other revision
-    control tools fail.</para>
+      <itemizedlist>
+	<listitem><para id="x_72">It will track the history and evolution of
+	    your project, so you don't have to.  For every change,
+	    you'll have a log of <emphasis>who</emphasis> made it;
+	    <emphasis>why</emphasis> they made it;
+	    <emphasis>when</emphasis> they made it; and
+	    <emphasis>what</emphasis> the change
+	    was.</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_73">When you're working with other people,
+	    revision control software makes it easier for you to
+	    collaborate.  For example, when people more or less
+	    simultaneously make potentially incompatible changes, the
+	    software will help you to identify and resolve those
+	    conflicts.</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_74">It can help you to recover from mistakes.  If
+	    you make a change that later turns out to be in error, you
+	    can revert to an earlier version of one or more files.  In
+	    fact, a <emphasis>really</emphasis> good revision control
+	    tool will even help you to efficiently figure out exactly
+	    when a problem was introduced (see section <xref
+	      linkend="sec.undo.bisect"/> for details).</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_75">It will help you to work simultaneously on,
+	    and manage the drift between, multiple versions of your
+	    project.</para></listitem>
+      </itemizedlist>
+
+      <para id="x_76">Most of these reasons are equally valid---at least in
+	theory---whether you're working on a project by yourself, or
+	with a hundred other people.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_77">A key question about the practicality of revision control
+	at these two different scales (<quote>lone hacker</quote> and
+	<quote>huge team</quote>) is how its
+	<emphasis>benefits</emphasis> compare to its
+	<emphasis>costs</emphasis>.  A revision control tool that's
+	difficult to understand or use is going to impose a high
+	cost.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_78">A five-hundred-person project is likely to collapse under
+	its own weight almost immediately without a revision control
+	tool and process. In this case, the cost of using revision
+	control might hardly seem worth considering, since
+	<emphasis>without</emphasis> it, failure is almost
+	guaranteed.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_79">On the other hand, a one-person <quote>quick hack</quote>
+	might seem like a poor place to use a revision control tool,
+	because surely the cost of using one must be close to the
+	overall cost of the project.  Right?</para>
+
+      <para id="x_7a">Mercurial uniquely supports <emphasis>both</emphasis> of
+	these scales of development.  You can learn the basics in just
+	a few minutes, and due to its low overhead, you can apply
+	revision control to the smallest of projects with ease.  Its
+	simplicity means you won't have a lot of abstruse concepts or
+	command sequences competing for mental space with whatever
+	you're <emphasis>really</emphasis> trying to do.  At the same
+	time, Mercurial's high performance and peer-to-peer nature let
+	you scale painlessly to handle large projects.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_7b">No revision control tool can rescue a poorly run project,
+	but a good choice of tools can make a huge difference to the
+	fluidity with which you can work on a project.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>The many names of revision control</title>
+
+      <para id="x_7c">Revision control is a diverse field, so much so that it is
+	referred to by many names and acronyms.  Here are a few of the
+	more common variations you'll encounter:</para>
+      <itemizedlist>
+	<listitem><para id="x_7d">Revision control (RCS)</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_7e">Software configuration management (SCM), or
+	    configuration management</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_7f">Source code management</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_80">Source code control, or source
+	    control</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_81">Version control
+	    (VCS)</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+      <para id="x_82">Some people claim that these terms actually have different
+	meanings, but in practice they overlap so much that there's no
+	agreed or even useful way to tease them apart.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
 
   <sect1>
     <title>This book is a work in progress</title>
 
-    <para>I am releasing this book while I am still writing it, in the
-      hope that it will prove useful to others.  I also hope that
-      readers will contribute as they see fit.</para>
+    <para id="x_83">I am releasing this book while I am still writing it, in the
+      hope that it will prove useful to others.  I am writing under an
+      open license in the hope that you, my readers, will contribute
+      feedback and perhaps content of your own.</para>
 
   </sect1>
   <sect1>
     <title>About the examples in this book</title>
 
-    <para>This book takes an unusual approach to code samples.  Every
+    <para id="x_84">This book takes an unusual approach to code samples.  Every
       example is <quote>live</quote>---each one is actually the result
       of a shell script that executes the Mercurial commands you see.
       Every time an image of the book is built from its sources, all
       the example scripts are automatically run, and their current
       results compared against their expected results.</para>
 
-    <para>The advantage of this approach is that the examples are
+    <para id="x_85">The advantage of this approach is that the examples are
       always accurate; they describe <emphasis>exactly</emphasis> the
       behaviour of the version of Mercurial that's mentioned at the
       front of the book.  If I update the version of Mercurial that
       I'm documenting, and the output of some command changes, the
       build fails.</para>
 
-    <para>There is a small disadvantage to this approach, which is
+    <para id="x_86">There is a small disadvantage to this approach, which is
       that the dates and times you'll see in examples tend to be
       <quote>squashed</quote> together in a way that they wouldn't be
       if the same commands were being typed by a human.  Where a human
@@ -47,27 +164,586 @@
       resulting timestamps correspondingly spread out, my automated
       example scripts run many commands in one second.</para>
 
-    <para>As an instance of this, several consecutive commits in an
+    <para id="x_87">As an instance of this, several consecutive commits in an
       example can show up as having occurred during the same second.
       You can see this occur in the <literal
 	role="hg-ext">bisect</literal> example in section <xref
 	id="sec.undo.bisect"/>, for instance.</para>
 
-    <para>So when you're reading examples, don't place too much weight
+    <para id="x_88">So when you're reading examples, don't place too much weight
       on the dates or times you see in the output of commands.  But
       <emphasis>do</emphasis> be confident that the behaviour you're
       seeing is consistent and reproducible.</para>
 
   </sect1>
+
   <sect1>
-    <title>Colophon---this book is Free</title>
+    <title>Trends in the field</title>
+
+    <para id="x_89">There has been an unmistakable trend in the development and
+      use of revision control tools over the past four decades, as
+      people have become familiar with the capabilities of their tools
+      and constrained by their limitations.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_8a">The first generation began by managing single files on
+      individual computers.  Although these tools represented a huge
+      advance over ad-hoc manual revision control, their locking model
+      and reliance on a single computer limited them to small,
+      tightly-knit teams.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_8b">The second generation loosened these constraints by moving
+      to network-centered architectures, and managing entire projects
+      at a time.  As projects grew larger, they ran into new problems.
+      With clients needing to talk to servers very frequently, server
+      scaling became an issue for large projects.  An unreliable
+      network connection could prevent remote users from being able to
+      talk to the server at all.  As open source projects started
+      making read-only access available anonymously to anyone, people
+      without commit privileges found that they could not use the
+      tools to interact with a project in a natural way, as they could
+      not record their changes.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_8c">The current generation of revision control tools is
+      peer-to-peer in nature.  All of these systems have dropped the
+      dependency on a single central server, and allow people to
+      distribute their revision control data to where it's actually
+      needed.  Collaboration over the Internet has moved from
+      constrained by technology to a matter of choice and consensus.
+      Modern tools can operate offline indefinitely and autonomously,
+      with a network connection only needed when syncing changes with
+      another repository.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>A few of the advantages of distributed revision
+      control</title>
+
+    <para id="x_8d">Even though distributed revision control tools have for
+      several years been as robust and usable as their
+      previous-generation counterparts, people using older tools have
+      not yet necessarily woken up to their advantages.  There are a
+      number of ways in which distributed tools shine relative to
+      centralised ones.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_8e">For an individual developer, distributed tools are almost
+      always much faster than centralised tools.  This is for a simple
+      reason: a centralised tool needs to talk over the network for
+      many common operations, because most metadata is stored in a
+      single copy on the central server.  A distributed tool stores
+      all of its metadata locally.  All else being equal, talking over
+      the network adds overhead to a centralised tool.  Don't
+      underestimate the value of a snappy, responsive tool: you're
+      going to spend a lot of time interacting with your revision
+      control software.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_8f">Distributed tools are indifferent to the vagaries of your
+      server infrastructure, again because they replicate metadata to
+      so many locations.  If you use a centralised system and your
+      server catches fire, you'd better hope that your backup media
+      are reliable, and that your last backup was recent and actually
+      worked.  With a distributed tool, you have many backups
+      available on every contributor's computer.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_90">The reliability of your network will affect distributed
+      tools far less than it will centralised tools.  You can't even
+      use a centralised tool without a network connection, except for
+      a few highly constrained commands.  With a distributed tool, if
+      your network connection goes down while you're working, you may
+      not even notice.  The only thing you won't be able to do is talk
+      to repositories on other computers, something that is relatively
+      rare compared with local operations.  If you have a far-flung
+      team of collaborators, this may be significant.</para>
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Advantages for open source projects</title>
+
+      <para id="x_91">If you take a shine to an open source project and decide
+	that you would like to start hacking on it, and that project
+	uses a distributed revision control tool, you are at once a
+	peer with the people who consider themselves the
+	<quote>core</quote> of that project.  If they publish their
+	repositories, you can immediately copy their project history,
+	start making changes, and record your work, using the same
+	tools in the same ways as insiders.  By contrast, with a
+	centralised tool, you must use the software in a <quote>read
+	  only</quote> mode unless someone grants you permission to
+	commit changes to their central server.  Until then, you won't
+	be able to record changes, and your local modifications will
+	be at risk of corruption any time you try to update your
+	client's view of the repository.</para>
+
+      <sect3>
+	<title>The forking non-problem</title>
+
+	<para id="x_92">It has been suggested that distributed revision control
+	  tools pose some sort of risk to open source projects because
+	  they make it easy to <quote>fork</quote> the development of
+	  a project.  A fork happens when there are differences in
+	  opinion or attitude between groups of developers that cause
+	  them to decide that they can't work together any longer.
+	  Each side takes a more or less complete copy of the
+	  project's source code, and goes off in its own
+	  direction.</para>
+
+	<para id="x_93">Sometimes the camps in a fork decide to reconcile their
+	  differences. With a centralised revision control system, the
+	  <emphasis>technical</emphasis> process of reconciliation is
+	  painful, and has to be performed largely by hand.  You have
+	  to decide whose revision history is going to
+	  <quote>win</quote>, and graft the other team's changes into
+	  the tree somehow. This usually loses some or all of one
+	  side's revision history.</para>
+
+	<para id="x_94">What distributed tools do with respect to forking is
+	  they make forking the <emphasis>only</emphasis> way to
+	  develop a project.  Every single change that you make is
+	  potentially a fork point.  The great strength of this
+	  approach is that a distributed revision control tool has to
+	  be really good at <emphasis>merging</emphasis> forks,
+	  because forks are absolutely fundamental: they happen all
+	  the time.</para>
+
+	<para id="x_95">If every piece of work that everybody does, all the
+	  time, is framed in terms of forking and merging, then what
+	  the open source world refers to as a <quote>fork</quote>
+	  becomes <emphasis>purely</emphasis> a social issue.  If
+	  anything, distributed tools <emphasis>lower</emphasis> the
+	  likelihood of a fork:</para>
+	<itemizedlist>
+	  <listitem><para id="x_96">They eliminate the social distinction that
+	      centralised tools impose: that between insiders (people
+	      with commit access) and outsiders (people
+	      without).</para></listitem>
+	  <listitem><para id="x_97">They make it easier to reconcile after a
+	      social fork, because all that's involved from the
+	      perspective of the revision control software is just
+	      another merge.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+	<para id="x_98">Some people resist distributed tools because they want
+	  to retain tight control over their projects, and they
+	  believe that centralised tools give them this control.
+	  However, if you're of this belief, and you publish your CVS
+	  or Subversion repositories publicly, there are plenty of
+	  tools available that can pull out your entire project's
+	  history (albeit slowly) and recreate it somewhere that you
+	  don't control.  So while your control in this case is
+	  illusory, you are forgoing the ability to fluidly
+	  collaborate with whatever people feel compelled to mirror
+	  and fork your history.</para>
+
+      </sect3>
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Advantages for commercial projects</title>
+
+      <para id="x_99">Many commercial projects are undertaken by teams that are
+	scattered across the globe.  Contributors who are far from a
+	central server will see slower command execution and perhaps
+	less reliability.  Commercial revision control systems attempt
+	to ameliorate these problems with remote-site replication
+	add-ons that are typically expensive to buy and cantankerous
+	to administer.  A distributed system doesn't suffer from these
+	problems in the first place.  Better yet, you can easily set
+	up multiple authoritative servers, say one per site, so that
+	there's no redundant communication between repositories over
+	expensive long-haul network links.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_9a">Centralised revision control systems tend to have
+	relatively low scalability.  It's not unusual for an expensive
+	centralised system to fall over under the combined load of
+	just a few dozen concurrent users.  Once again, the typical
+	response tends to be an expensive and clunky replication
+	facility.  Since the load on a central server---if you have
+	one at all---is many times lower with a distributed tool
+	(because all of the data is replicated everywhere), a single
+	cheap server can handle the needs of a much larger team, and
+	replication to balance load becomes a simple matter of
+	scripting.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_9b">If you have an employee in the field, troubleshooting a
+	problem at a customer's site, they'll benefit from distributed
+	revision control. The tool will let them generate custom
+	builds, try different fixes in isolation from each other, and
+	search efficiently through history for the sources of bugs and
+	regressions in the customer's environment, all without needing
+	to connect to your company's network.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Why choose Mercurial?</title>
+
+    <para id="x_9c">Mercurial has a unique set of properties that make it a
+      particularly good choice as a revision control system.</para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem><para id="x_9d">It is easy to learn and use.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_9e">It is lightweight.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_9f">It scales excellently.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_a0">It is easy to
+	  customise.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+    <para id="x_a1">If you are at all familiar with revision control systems,
+      you should be able to get up and running with Mercurial in less
+      than five minutes.  Even if not, it will take no more than a few
+      minutes longer.  Mercurial's command and feature sets are
+      generally uniform and consistent, so you can keep track of a few
+      general rules instead of a host of exceptions.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_a2">On a small project, you can start working with Mercurial in
+      moments. Creating new changes and branches; transferring changes
+      around (whether locally or over a network); and history and
+      status operations are all fast.  Mercurial attempts to stay
+      nimble and largely out of your way by combining low cognitive
+      overhead with blazingly fast operations.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_a3">The usefulness of Mercurial is not limited to small
+      projects: it is used by projects with hundreds to thousands of
+      contributors, each containing tens of thousands of files and
+      hundreds of megabytes of source code.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_a4">If the core functionality of Mercurial is not enough for
+      you, it's easy to build on.  Mercurial is well suited to
+      scripting tasks, and its clean internals and implementation in
+      Python make it easy to add features in the form of extensions.
+      There are a number of popular and useful extensions already
+      available, ranging from helping to identify bugs to improving
+      performance.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Mercurial compared with other tools</title>
+
+    <para id="x_a5">Before you read on, please understand that this section
+      necessarily reflects my own experiences, interests, and (dare I
+      say it) biases.  I have used every one of the revision control
+      tools listed below, in most cases for several years at a
+      time.</para>
+
+
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Subversion</title>
+
+      <para id="x_a6">Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed
+	to replace CVS.  It has a centralised client/server
+	architecture.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_a7">Subversion and Mercurial have similarly named commands for
+	performing the same operations, so if you're familiar with
+	one, it is easy to learn to use the other.  Both tools are
+	portable to all popular operating systems.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_a8">Prior to version 1.5, Subversion had no useful support for
+	merges. At the time of writing, its merge tracking capability
+	is new, and known to be <ulink
+	  url="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.finalword">complicated 
+	  and buggy</ulink>.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_a9">Mercurial has a substantial performance advantage over
+	Subversion on every revision control operation I have
+	benchmarked.  I have measured its advantage as ranging from a
+	factor of two to a factor of six when compared with Subversion
+	1.4.3's <emphasis>ra_local</emphasis> file store, which is the
+	fastest access method available.  In more realistic
+	deployments involving a network-based store, Subversion will
+	be at a substantially larger disadvantage.  Because many
+	Subversion commands must talk to the server and Subversion
+	does not have useful replication facilities, server capacity
+	and network bandwidth become bottlenecks for modestly large
+	projects.</para>
 
-    <para>This book is licensed under the Open Publication License,
+      <para id="x_aa">Additionally, Subversion incurs substantial storage
+	overhead to avoid network transactions for a few common
+	operations, such as finding modified files
+	(<literal>status</literal>) and displaying modifications
+	against the current revision (<literal>diff</literal>).  As a
+	result, a Subversion working copy is often the same size as,
+	or larger than, a Mercurial repository and working directory,
+	even though the Mercurial repository contains a complete
+	history of the project.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_ab">Subversion is widely supported by third party tools.
+	Mercurial currently lags considerably in this area.  This gap
+	is closing, however, and indeed some of Mercurial's GUI tools
+	now outshine their Subversion equivalents.  Like Mercurial,
+	Subversion has an excellent user manual.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_ac">Because Subversion doesn't store revision history on the
+	client, it is well suited to managing projects that deal with
+	lots of large, opaque binary files.  If you check in fifty
+	revisions to an incompressible 10MB file, Subversion's
+	client-side space usage stays constant The space used by any
+	distributed SCM will grow rapidly in proportion to the number
+	of revisions, because the differences between each revision
+	are large.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_ad">In addition, it's often difficult or, more usually,
+	impossible to merge different versions of a binary file.
+	Subversion's ability to let a user lock a file, so that they
+	temporarily have the exclusive right to commit changes to it,
+	can be a significant advantage to a project where binary files
+	are widely used.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_ae">Mercurial can import revision history from a Subversion
+	repository. It can also export revision history to a
+	Subversion repository.  This makes it easy to <quote>test the
+	  waters</quote> and use Mercurial and Subversion in parallel
+	before deciding to switch.  History conversion is incremental,
+	so you can perform an initial conversion, then small
+	additional conversions afterwards to bring in new
+	changes.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Git</title>
+
+      <para id="x_af">Git is a distributed revision control tool that was
+	developed for managing the Linux kernel source tree.  Like
+	Mercurial, its early design was somewhat influenced by
+	Monotone.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b0">Git has a very large command set, with version 1.5.0
+	providing 139 individual commands.  It has something of a
+	reputation for being difficult to learn.  Compared to Git,
+	Mercurial has a strong focus on simplicity.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b1">In terms of performance, Git is extremely fast.  In
+	several cases, it is faster than Mercurial, at least on Linux,
+	while Mercurial performs better on other operations.  However,
+	on Windows, the performance and general level of support that
+	Git provides is, at the time of writing, far behind that of
+	Mercurial.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b2">While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git
+	repository requires frequent manual <quote>repacks</quote> of
+	its metadata.  Without these, performance degrades, while
+	space usage grows rapidly.  A server that contains many Git
+	repositories that are not rigorously and frequently repacked
+	will become heavily disk-bound during backups, and there have
+	been instances of daily backups taking far longer than 24
+	hours as a result.  A freshly packed Git repository is
+	slightly smaller than a Mercurial repository, but an unpacked
+	repository is several orders of magnitude larger.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b3">The core of Git is written in C.  Many Git commands are
+	implemented as shell or Perl scripts, and the quality of these
+	scripts varies widely. I have encountered several instances
+	where scripts charged along blindly in the presence of errors
+	that should have been fatal.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b4">Mercurial can import revision history from a Git
+	repository.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>CVS</title>
+
+      <para id="x_b5">CVS is probably the most widely used revision control tool
+	in the world.  Due to its age and internal untidiness, it has
+	been only lightly maintained for many years.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b6">It has a centralised client/server architecture.  It does
+	not group related file changes into atomic commits, making it
+	easy for people to <quote>break the build</quote>: one person
+	can successfully commit part of a change and then be blocked
+	by the need for a merge, causing other people to see only a
+	portion of the work they intended to do.  This also affects
+	how you work with project history.  If you want to see all of
+	the modifications someone made as part of a task, you will
+	need to manually inspect the descriptions and timestamps of
+	the changes made to each file involved (if you even know what
+	those files were).</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b7">CVS has a muddled notion of tags and branches that I will
+	not attempt to even describe.  It does not support renaming of
+	files or directories well, making it easy to corrupt a
+	repository.  It has almost no internal consistency checking
+	capabilities, so it is usually not even possible to tell
+	whether or how a repository is corrupt.  I would not recommend
+	CVS for any project, existing or new.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b8">Mercurial can import CVS revision history.  However, there
+	are a few caveats that apply; these are true of every other
+	revision control tool's CVS importer, too.  Due to CVS's lack
+	of atomic changes and unversioned filesystem hierarchy, it is
+	not possible to reconstruct CVS history completely accurately;
+	some guesswork is involved, and renames will usually not show
+	up.  Because a lot of advanced CVS administration has to be
+	done by hand and is hence error-prone, it's common for CVS
+	importers to run into multiple problems with corrupted
+	repositories (completely bogus revision timestamps and files
+	that have remained locked for over a decade are just two of
+	the less interesting problems I can recall from personal
+	experience).</para>
+
+      <para id="x_b9">Mercurial can import revision history from a CVS
+	repository.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Commercial tools</title>
+
+      <para id="x_ba">Perforce has a centralised client/server architecture,
+	with no client-side caching of any data.  Unlike modern
+	revision control tools, Perforce requires that a user run a
+	command to inform the server about every file they intend to
+	edit.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_bb">The performance of Perforce is quite good for small teams,
+	but it falls off rapidly as the number of users grows beyond a
+	few dozen. Modestly large Perforce installations require the
+	deployment of proxies to cope with the load their users
+	generate.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+    <sect2>
+      <title>Choosing a revision control tool</title>
+
+      <para id="x_bc">With the exception of CVS, all of the tools listed above
+	have unique strengths that suit them to particular styles of
+	work.  There is no single revision control tool that is best
+	in all situations.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_bd">As an example, Subversion is a good choice for working
+	with frequently edited binary files, due to its centralised
+	nature and support for file locking.</para>
+
+      <para id="x_be">I personally find Mercurial's properties of simplicity,
+	performance, and good merge support to be a compelling
+	combination that has served me well for several years.</para>
+
+
+    </sect2>
+  </sect1>
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Switching from another tool to Mercurial</title>
+
+    <para id="x_bf">Mercurial is bundled with an extension named <literal
+	role="hg-ext">convert</literal>, which can incrementally
+      import revision history from several other revision control
+      tools.  By <quote>incremental</quote>, I mean that you can
+      convert all of a project's history to date in one go, then rerun
+      the conversion later to obtain new changes that happened after
+      the initial conversion.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_c0">The revision control tools supported by <literal
+	role="hg-ext">convert</literal> are as follows:</para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c1">Subversion</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c2">CVS</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c3">Git</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c4">Darcs</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+
+    <para id="x_c5">In addition, <literal role="hg-ext">convert</literal> can
+      export changes from Mercurial to Subversion.  This makes it
+      possible to try Subversion and Mercurial in parallel before
+      committing to a switchover, without risking the loss of any
+      work.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_c6">The <command role="hg-ext-convert">convert</command> command
+      is easy to use.  Simply point it at the path or URL of the
+      source repository, optionally give it the name of the
+      destination repository, and it will start working.  After the
+      initial conversion, just run the same command again to import
+      new changes.</para>
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+    <title>A short history of revision control</title>
+
+    <para id="x_c7">The best known of the old-time revision control tools is
+      SCCS (Source Code Control System), which Marc Rochkind wrote at
+      Bell Labs, in the early 1970s.  SCCS operated on individual
+      files, and required every person working on a project to have
+      access to a shared workspace on a single system.  Only one
+      person could modify a file at any time; arbitration for access
+      to files was via locks.  It was common for people to lock files,
+      and later forget to unlock them, preventing anyone else from
+      modifying those files without the help of an
+      administrator.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_c8">Walter Tichy developed a free alternative to SCCS in the
+      early 1980s; he called his program RCS (Revision Control System).
+      Like SCCS, RCS required developers to work in a single shared
+      workspace, and to lock files to prevent multiple people from
+      modifying them simultaneously.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_c9">Later in the 1980s, Dick Grune used RCS as a building block
+      for a set of shell scripts he initially called cmt, but then
+      renamed to CVS (Concurrent Versions System).  The big innovation
+      of CVS was that it let developers work simultaneously and
+      somewhat independently in their own personal workspaces.  The
+      personal workspaces prevented developers from stepping on each
+      other's toes all the time, as was common with SCCS and RCS. Each
+      developer had a copy of every project file, and could modify
+      their copies independently.  They had to merge their edits prior
+      to committing changes to the central repository.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_ca">Brian Berliner took Grune's original scripts and rewrote
+      them in C, releasing in 1989 the code that has since developed
+      into the modern version of CVS.  CVS subsequently acquired the
+      ability to operate over a network connection, giving it a
+      client/server architecture.  CVS's architecture is centralised;
+      only the server has a copy of the history of the project. Client
+      workspaces just contain copies of recent versions of the
+      project's files, and a little metadata to tell them where the
+      server is.  CVS has been enormously successful; it is probably
+      the world's most widely used revision control system.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_cb">In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems developed an early
+      distributed revision control system, called TeamWare.  A
+      TeamWare workspace contains a complete copy of the project's
+      history.  TeamWare has no notion of a central repository.  (CVS
+      relied upon RCS for its history storage; TeamWare used
+      SCCS.)</para>
+
+    <para id="x_cc">As the 1990s progressed, awareness grew of a number of
+      problems with CVS.  It records simultaneous changes to multiple
+      files individually, instead of grouping them together as a
+      single logically atomic operation.  It does not manage its file
+      hierarchy well; it is easy to make a mess of a repository by
+      renaming files and directories.  Worse, its source code is
+      difficult to read and maintain, which made the <quote>pain
+	level</quote> of fixing these architectural problems
+      prohibitive.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_cd">In 2001, Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel, two developers who had
+      worked on CVS, started a project to replace it with a tool that
+      would have a better architecture and cleaner code.  The result,
+      Subversion, does not stray from CVS's centralised client/server
+      model, but it adds multi-file atomic commits, better namespace
+      management, and a number of other features that make it a
+      generally better tool than CVS. Since its initial release, it
+      has rapidly grown in popularity.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_ce">More or less simultaneously, Graydon Hoare began working on
+      an ambitious distributed revision control system that he named
+      Monotone. While Monotone addresses many of CVS's design flaws
+      and has a peer-to-peer architecture, it goes beyond earlier (and
+      subsequent) revision control tools in a number of innovative
+      ways.  It uses cryptographic hashes as identifiers, and has an
+      integral notion of <quote>trust</quote> for code from different
+      sources.</para>
+
+    <para id="x_cf">Mercurial began life in 2005.  While a few aspects of its
+      design are influenced by Monotone, Mercurial focuses on ease of
+      use, high performance, and scalability to very large
+      projects.</para>
+
+  </sect1>
+
+  <sect1>
+    <title>Colophon&emdash;this book is Free</title>
+
+    <para id="x_d0">This book is licensed under the Open Publication License,
       and is produced entirely using Free Software tools.  It is
       typeset with DocBook XML.  Illustrations are drawn and rendered with
       <ulink url="http://www.inkscape.org/">Inkscape</ulink>.</para>
 
-    <para>The complete source code for this book is published as a
+    <para id="x_d1">The complete source code for this book is published as a
       Mercurial repository, at <ulink
 	url="http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book">http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book</ulink>.</para>