We are a growing development team and have decided to implement source control. We have settled on Mercurial but my question is not Mercurial specific, it is about how to maximise the benefit of source control without it interfering too much with our work-flow etc. None of us have any experience with version control.
Currently we have a central WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL and PHP) setup and we are all working on the files on that server. We all use Netbeans and are happy with it.
We have added Mercurial visioning to the files in our new project that we will release to the public (a large Joomla component) but seeing that we are all working directly on the files when one person checks in a folder - he might also check in someone else’s work. Another draw back is that I can not see how we are meant to create branches and merge them later.
I think that to get the optimal out of version control we should probably all install WAMP locally on our machines and then “fetch” the project down to our own machines and then “commit” back up when done with each bug fix or feature enhancement, but this seems like a lot of work just to get the extra features.
Are we doing it wrong? Have I misunderstood this? What would you recommend?