svk is pretty good for online/offline stuff against svn, but yes, using a real dvcs is better.

sounds like you have a similar history to me, though I started with SCCS and have had detours via PCVS (ugh!) and Continuus (double ugh!) SourceSafe (expletive deleted) and StarTeam (I'll get me coat) all flavors of much the same thing. Maybe we're both ready for git?

I'm also use mercurial for my own projects - writings, codings & home page. I had selected it due crossplatform - now i'm using it between MacOSX, Linux & Windows, and all works fine. Exchange of data happens via usb flash.

Norm, don't switch just yet. Download SVK and checkout your Subversion repository like normal. You're now using a distributed version of Subversion, Huzza! To mirror a Subversion repository and then make a branch for local editing you can do this:

$ svk mirror http://www.example.com/repository/ //mirror/example
$ svk cp //mirror/example //local/example
$ svk co //local/example

Once you have finished make your edits in your local copy of the repository you can check in while off-line or what have you, just like normal:

$ cd example
$ svk ci -m "Some local commits."

Once you are ready to push these changes back to the mirrored repository you can do:

$ svk push

Easy as pie, no need to learn another system at all.

I also experimented with SVK for awhile (because I do in fact need to be able to sync with some remote Subversion repositories). It works as advertised, but be warned that it's awfully slow (at least on my 2.0GHz Intel MacBook). I'd still like to try out git and Mercurial sometime soon to see if their performance is any better.

I considered SVK, too. In the end I decided I really wanted to try Mercurial (in preparation for working on OpenJDK, if nothing else).

So far, it seems to work fine. The only thing I'm having trouble getting used to is that 'hg status' gives you the status of the whole repository; you have to explicitly say 'hg status .' if you only want to see the status of the current directory. But that's just a design choice and I can see both sides.

I'm also finding the one, top-level .hgignore file a little funky. Subversion's notion of properties is really nicer.

I have a similar history of version control systems, and resently I've started using Monotone, which i quite like (even though it's missing keyword substitution).

A summary description of Monotone sounds rather similar to what you say about Mercury; it's peer-to-peer to the core (everything is cryptographically signed, so you can even have people you don't trust with commit privs, and someone you do trust can then sign their actual commits if they are good).

Actually, I have been converting SVN repositories to Mercurial as well, but it turns out to be a very nice to have a single list of ignores for the whole repository/working dir. Easier to check what I should copy manually...

I do see something that seems screwed up: at the bottom of this page is a line that says "Last modified: Sat, 01 Jan 2005". I don't know what it's trying to say, but it's either wrong or extremely confusing. (I don't know if this has anything to do with your move to Mercurial, though.)

I'd be interested in another post in a couple of weeks, saying whether you still like Mercurial.

Nice catch, Carl. The last modified date was formatted incorrectly because the $Date$ keyword substitution of Mercurial differs from Subversion. That's fixed now and I'm rebuilding (all) the HTML.

I too had thought the OpenJDK project would go with Mercurial.

In case you hadn't noticed, the OpenJDK source has been published in a SVN repo: https://openjdk.dev.java.net/source/browse/openjdk/ (despite the fact that I can't find an announcement of any sort).