[Mailman-Developers] Should we move to Bazaar?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > On May 5, 2007, at 12:49 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > I'm now a lot less happy with Mercurial than I was a day ago.
 > 
 > Bummer.

Well, Mike (XEmacs's Mercurial champion) accuses Tailor of abusing the
Mercurial APIs.  He has a point, although my worries retain some
validity, I think.

 > I'm about to head up to New York City for the day, so just a  
 > quick note of thanks for taking a look at this.  Once you're done  
 > will we be able to get a bzr branch from Tailor or will we have to do  
 > another import?

I'm not sure what you mean.  I don't think it's a good idea to go
svn->hg->bzr, if that's what you mean; there's some degradation of
metadata in each transition.  I'll give a Tailor svn->bzr conversion a
shot.  Let me know what you want to do about giving "concerned
parties" access to them (I presume you don't want them sitting on a
Googlable webserver at this point).

Please note that no conversion has taken as much as three hours.  One
svn rev per second seems to be the going rate for all of the
conversion tools I've tried, and the initialization from the svn log
takes only a few seconds.

IOW, I can surely make full imports faster than you can evaluate
them.<wink>  The question will be preserving or injecting desired
metadata (eg, sensible summary logs, user id mapping), which for most
tools will take some hacking.

 > Please keep us up to date about how it goes.

OK, at this point, I've temporarily given up on Tailor for svn->hg.
There's a locking deadlock (I think) in Mercurial at about r7721, and
it will take some time to diagnose that.

I did get both a full trunk conversion and a "trunk/mailman" only
conversion from the hgsvn tool (which is just a one-way sync, svn to
hg).  hgsvn has the advantage of being a PyPI project.  easy_install
hgsvn if somebody wants to try.  (If you don't have easy_install, you
can get it from http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall.)

I also tried Eric Hopper's svn2hg (there are a couple of tools by that
name).  It looks well-coded, but it's not ready for general use.