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

[Theodore Tso]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 09:33:54PM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Freitag 09 Januar 2009 15:36:26 schrieb Theodore Tso:
> > On the git side, uses of git octopus merges would not be
> > allowed.
> 
> Couldn't these be simply emulated by multiple merges on the Mercurial side, 
> maybe all merges done in a bookmark or something similar which clearly marks 
> them as representation of an octopus merge? 

Possibly; but there's a lot to be said for keeping the shape of the
DAG the same, and any emulation of an octobus merge makes that
difficult.  If it was emulated in such a way, bad things could happen
if in the Hg universe, someone based a branch on a commit which was in
the "middle" of the octobus merge emulation.  That might fall in the
"Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do that" category, but like you I see
supprting octopus merges as very low priority.

> The same way could be used to save committed-by IDs and any other
> incompatible data from git.
> 
> We'd simply have a bridge repo, then, to which we could just push
> our changes and then push them to git from that bridge repo (just
> like using an outgoing repo).
> 
> Naturally we could also directly work in the bridge repo. 
> 
> As soon as hg has that, git might experience pressure to add the
> same gateway into the other direction.

Well, you have to be able to go both ways, with the initial gateway,
or it's not useful.  You have to be able to populate the bridge repo
somehow, and once you have that, and the ability to push new hg
changes to the git repo, you've got your bidrectional gateway.....

	       	   	 	    	 - Ted