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

[Theodore Tso]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 01:44:21AM +0100, David Soria Parra wrote:
>> Well, if you're going to use bookmarks instead of hg's native
>> branches, when you need is support for the concept of the "current"
>> bookmark, so that commits only affect the "current" bookmark, and not
> This is already in crew and will be in hg 1.2.

Cool!

> I'm not sure why it is needed to sign bookmarks. As far as I know it is  
> not possible to sign
> git branches. But I agree that push/pull is a big thing, but it requires
> a wire protocol change.

No, but you can sign git tags, and in order to implement a
bidrectional hg<->git repository, we would need use bookmarks to
emulate git tags, as well.   For why, please see:

	http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/11/1/3891924
	http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/10/28/3844814

Of course, the digital signature would break as part of the gatewaying
process, but what the gateway server could do is to verify the
signature, then create a signed tag which included in the message of
the tag the body and git/hg commit id of the original signed tag.  But
I admit that some method of propgated PGP signed tags is very much a
nicety, and is clearly a low priority item.

In any case, once there is a push/pull support bookmarks, I would
claim that the design for a bidrectional hg/git gateway is simple
enough that it could be implemented as Google Summer of Code project;
and I'd be willing to mentor a student who was interested in working
on such a project.

					- Ted