Commit meta data and extensions

[Tory Patnoe]

I'm new to Mercurial and am looking for a way to track meta-data with 
each commit to a specific branch. The meta-data I'm looking to track is 
a task id and story id from an agile development system.

We plan on working in a central-repo with gatekeeper work-flow.

I saw the bugmap extension posting in the mailing lists but I'm thinking 
of something more integrated with mercurial. I think bugmap might work 
if the bugmap data could be pushed/pulled between repos. Is that 
possible with an extension? That way I could change/update meta-data 
without changing the history of a commit. Although this could lead to 
merge conflicts on the meta-data or even meta-data pointing to 
non-existent revisions.

The other approach I see is to require meta-data on each commit to a 
given branch. This would involve 1 extension and 1 hook.

The extension would prompt the developer at commit time to enter a task 
id and story id. That data would then be added to either the bottom of 
the commit message or to meta-data on the commit itself. I saw that 
commitctx's can have "extra" data. Is it better to put my meta-data in 
the commit message or as "extra" meta-data on the commit ctx?

The hook would be on the central repository and prevent push'es without 
the necessary meta-data.

Thanks
Tory