Dropbox plus Mercurial -driven development. Anyone tried that?

This is universally a bad idea, you should never want anything other than maybe a text change to go to production with a click of the save button. There are just too many issues it can create. Even if you are a 1 man shop and the app you are working on is insignificant, saving to prod is a really bad habit to get into.

The reason being is it's power is seductive once you start working that way you cant turn back, everything else seems slow and time consuming, so when you get into a larger environment you skip steps and it causes a lot of problems for other people. I had a developer once who worked like that, he was really, really, really good, but he had this bad habit of dropping the files directly to production, and saying well it was just a little change. We ended up having to get rid of him because he created a host of problems by always trying to circumvent the process.

Files would not get into version control, but would be on production so next drop reverted stuff, test environments where not in sync with prod, we had to restrict developers rights on machines, it was a mess. Anyways point is, I think the Mercurial dropbox thing is a good idea, but don't get in the habit of saving directly to prod, it can become a very nasty habit to break.