[pydotorg-www] [Pydotorg] Mercurial mirror

[anatoly techtonik]

CCed to pydotorg public list if you don't mind.

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 1:50 AM, Georg Brandl <georg at python.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is there a Mercurial mirror of 'pydotorg' inventory?
>>>> Any plans to create one?
>>>> Any proposal about possible workflow?
>>>>
>>> No, no, and no.
>>
>> It would be nice to switch to Mercurial though. :-)
>
> While it certainly doesn't hurt, I don't see the point.  People will
> hardly start their own forks, and branch like crazy, or put that on
> bitbucket. (Would we even want them to?)

The main idea is to allow people publish patch queues for review if
they do not have access to repository.

Mercurial patch queues has 1:1 relations to Moderation Queue concept
[1] that allows to review and commit edits from people who do not have
access to edit content themselves.

More than that - Mercurial can provide more than 70% of backend
functionality. It already allows importing patches, emailing them,
publishing patches in public repositories and sharing then between
repositories. Mercurial patch queues concept is awesome, but may be
not intuitive (i.e. user friendly) sometimes. Plain commits into
separate repositories may do a better job, but stil 30% of backend
work is still required. But thanks to Mercurial plugin concepts and
Python extensibility the development of other 30% could be a snap.

One major advantage of Mercurial over SVN for the community is that
commits bear names of authors and committers separately providing
attribution that is vital for every healthy collaboration. Speacking
about attribution, even though Mercurial has this feature, Python
community has much to learn from Subversion - I advise everybody to
look at Crediting section in Subversion Community Guide [2].

The fact that contribulyzer.py [3] is written in Python leads me to
rather philosophical question why contribulyzer.py was not (or could
not be) born in Python community?

P.S. Feel free to change thread subject line as needed.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/rainforce/wiki/ModerationQueue
[2] http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/conventions.html#crediting
[3] http://www.red-bean.com/svnproject/contribulyzer/
-- 
anatoly t.