[hlidotbe]

Using a working copy allows you to deploy your website faster and safer (only the changes gets transfered, you can have hooks to do some cleanup and rollbacks are almost free).

I use Mercurial on all my websites (disabling access to .*/.hg of course) and never use FTP for anything.

[masklinn]

> Using a working copy allows you to deploy your website faster and safer

It's clearly faster, it clearly is not safer, as the article demonstrate: if you forget to configure Apache to ignore the repo folders, your source code becomes available to the world.

> you can have hooks to do some cleanup and rollbacks are almost free

Export to versioned directories, then use symlinks to link your core to the right version of the site, and you get rollbacks for free as well. The only thing a WC gets you is deployment speed.

[ErrantX]

one good idea I had was using a patch queue to insert database and other "secret" settings into a Mercurial pull.

So when I deploy updates to sites we pull and update the changes then merge a locally stored patch queue to reconfigure the settings.

Because the settings are locally stored on the server (not in the site root) there is no way for people to steal the details from the public mercurial server :D