Mercurial and SVN side by side in same working directory?

Question

Our environment currently uses SVN. I would like to commit alot more often, but I don't want to break any of the main branches. Personally I love mercurial much much more than SVN. If I hg init a repository in my SVN working copy would any issues arise if I just commit into the mercurial repository on a regular basis and committed working revisions into the SVN branch?

Our environment is not currently setup such that each developer has their own SVN branch, and so this is not a viable solution currently.

Answer 1

There will not be any problem with having Mercurial and Subversion share a working folder. Subversion keeps its files in .svn folders while Mercurial keeps its files in a .hg folder at the top level.

For convenience, you may consider adding a .svn/ entry to your .hgignore file so you don't accidentally commit .svn folders in your Mercurial repository.

That being said. You do not necessarily need to use Subversion at all. Mercurial can interface with Subversion without a subversion client. See Working with Subversion.