Promoting the use of Mercurial; was: Re: gnome dvcs survey results

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab at web.de> wrote:
> Am Montag 05 Januar 2009 20:46:08 schrieb Neal Becker:
>> http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2009/01/03/gnome-dvcs-survey-results/
>
> This somehow bothers me, since it shows that some people use momentum as main
> argument for switching to git.
>
> I also found an error in my way of talking about Mercurial when I discuss
> VCSs. I tend to say "git is more for more technical people", but that's a big
> mistake. These more technical people are those who flock to projects in their
> early stage.
>
> Instead I think I should say "git is most useful for those who need to
> maintain complex workflows and forces the complexity needed for these tasks on
> every user. Mercurial on the other hand just works but offers extensions for
> the complex tasks."
>
> But I'm not quite sure if that is the best way for Mercurial.
>
> Mercurial is the VCS which works best for me, and I think it also is the VCS
> whose adoption would be the best for most projects.
>
> And I think the next place to work at is the DVCS PEP for Python:
> - http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg7fctr4_40dvjkdg64
>
> I'd be happy to see and join discussions about it in here (I've been sending
> comments to Alexandre for some time, now).

Interesting that the bzr example for the scenario "Separation of Issue
Dependencies" should use loom, but hg uses clones. With hg, we could
use mq or pbranch, thus getting the same benefits of amending patches
etc. And note that the bzr example does not show how the work is
supposed to be pushed upstream. Send a patch? Merge into main with the
detailed patch history? Essentially, the use of the hg clones with the
pull between them is similar to bzr's loom example, committing
detailed patch history in the end.

And doesn't transplant make a note about the cherrypick which tells
merge something later? (Obviously, I'm not sure about this, either.)

-parren