[Python-Dev] Mercurial?

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

(going back on-list)

On 05/04/2009 15:42, Alexandre Vassalotti wrote:
>> I'm pretty sure that we'll need to reconvert; I don't think the current
>> conversion is particularly good.
>
> What is bad about it?

For one thing, it has the [svn] prefixes, which I found to be quite 
ugly. hgsubversion in many cases will preserve the rev order from svn so 
that the local revision numbers that hg shows will be the same as in SVN 
anyway. On top of that, good conversion tools save the svn revision in 
the revision metadata in hg, so that you can see it with log --debug.

For another, I'd like to use an author map to bring the revision authors 
more in line with what Mercurial repositories usually display; this 
helps with tool support and is also just a nicer solution IMO.

I have a stab at an author map at http://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/author-map. 
Could use some review, but it seems like a good start.

> I largely prefer clone to named branches. From personal experience, I
> found named branches difficult to use properly. And, I think even
> Mercurial developers don't use them.

No, the Mercurial project currently doesn't use them. Mozilla does use 
them at the moment, because they found they did have some advantages 
(especially lower disk usage because no separate clones were needed). I 
think named branches are fine for long-lived branches.

At the very least we should have a proper discussion over this.

> How do you reorder the revlog of a repository?

There are scripts for this which can be investigated.

> I am in favor of pruning the old branches, but not of leaving the old
> history behind. The current Mercurial mirror of py3k is 92M on my disk
> which is totally reasonable. So, I don't see what would be the
> advantage there.

The current Mercurial mirror for py3k also doesn't include any history 
from before it was branched, which is bad, IMO. In order to get the most 
of the DVCS structure, it would be helpful if py3k shared history with 
the normal (trunk) branches.

> I was thinking of something very basic—e.g., something like a commit
> hook that would asynchronously commit the latest revision to svn. We
> wouldn't to keep convert much meta-data just the committer's name and
> the changelog would be fine.

What's the use case, who do you want to support with this? hgweb 
trivially provides tarballs for download on every revision, so people 
who don't want to use hg can easily download a snapshot.

> Not really. Currently, core developers can only push stuff using the
> Bazaar setup. Personally, I think SSH access would be a lot nicer, but
> this will depend how confident python.org's admins are with this idea.

We could still enable pushing through http(s) for hgweb(dir).

Cheers,

Dirkjan