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

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 20:48 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 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.

Maybe. There are a number of places where schemas are different enough
to make hash-preserving round-tripping between git and Mercurial
difficult:

- mercurial tags vs git tags
- mercurial branches (no direct git analog)
- git branches vs mercurial bookmarks
- mercurial signatures vs git signatures
- git committed-by
- mercurial copy/rename data
- mercurial manifests vs git trees
- git octopus merges (no mercurial analog)
- mercurial file indexes and linkrevs
- etc.

It'd probably be easier to simply make a git format back-end for
Mercurial. This is probably less work than making a Mercurial back-end
for git as Mercurial's repository operations are already moderately well
isolated by its repository and context objects. But I certainly don't
have the patience for it.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.