Mercurial on OpenSolaris and GlassFish

I am working on rewriting a set of labs for our intermediate students at SJSU. Version control is something that everyone with a CS degree is pretty much expected to know these days, so I thought of digging up an old Subversion lab from my open source programming class. But distributed version control systems such as Mercurial and Git are getting all the love these days. Some people said that it is actually easier to teach Mercurial than Subversion. This seemed unintuitive--wouldn't it be harder to deal with a bunch of repositories instead of having just one centralized one? Actually, I now see the point. It is really easy to get going with Mercurial as a single user. The student has an instant benefit: The repository is a "time machine". The instructor, if so inclined, has an instant benefit too: The repository makes it harder to cheat. How so? I'll require my students to commit before every test run, and have them submit the zipped repository. It is really easy to tell who made and fixed lots of errors over a period of time, and who mysteriously got their code working perfectly in one try. Of course, for team work, we need a server. I installed Mercurial and the splendid mercurial-server onto a donated Sun server running OpenSolaris and GlassFish. Installation was a bit off the beaten track, so here are the directions. Mercurial was easy enough—it's in the standard repos. But mercurial-server is only in contr...

Date: March, 28 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/03/28/mercurial-opensolaris-and-glassfish

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