Is it a good idea to put Mercurial Repository in shared Network drive?

Question

we are small team of 3 developers (Boss, me and another developer working mostly remote), and I am tasked to setup a repository server for Mercurial HG.

It seems like I can simply put our centralized repository on a shared network drive. It will extremely easy to setup, but seems like there is a risk that any one of us could abuse the convenient of working/modify the source repository directly. That is why I am thinking about using HgWebdir server as a way to control access to central repository. So directly access to the central source repository is not encouraged, but the shared drive will be here just in case.

I guess it is a question of defined our in-house version-control procedure, not a really version-control question, but I am still go ahead and ask the question. As I don't feel I am experienced enough to make the decision, and if I am not 100% sure that my reason and means a valid, it is probably hard for me to enforce the way version-control system should be used by other developers.

Edit:

I can see that there are potential issues on shared folder working with Version-control software. But anyone care to explain bit more what happened behind the scene, when pushes to shared folder? My understanding is that shared drive is essentially a shared link/shortcut, so for a shared drive, Mercurial on local machine is only hold the lock for that link, but the fact is that each users machine could had a different instance of Mercurial holding the links' lock, while the server's Mercurial instance will hold its own link on physical drive. I can see it is complicated, but how it is going to fail? I can understand the conclusion, but couldn't by myself link the facts to the conclusion

Answer 1

You should not place the Mercurial repository on a shared folder on a network server because Mercurial cannot reliably hold locks in all situations in such a setup, and during pushes to that central repository, locks are crucial to avoid corrupting the repository.

In fact, I would remove the "not encouraged" and replace it with "not possible", and only serve the repository either with hgweb or hg serve, the former being the recommended setup for long-running servers.

Answer 2

If you have a centralized server you can install hgweb there and push and pull from it as a central and BACKED-UP source. We still have Windows 2003 servers (I am in no position to change that) and with a little searching on the web was able to find info on how to setup a hgweb on a Windows server though most of it referred to Windows Server 2007.