[Kde-scm-interest] Mercurial

[Thiago Macieira]

Pierre THIERRY wrote:
>I just got subscribed and skimmed through the few mails already
>exchanged about having a DVCS for KDE. Git has been discussed, but have
>you considered Mercurial?

I did consider it, for a time. But I stopped when I was told that, in 
order to create a branch, I'd need to clone the entire repository.

I did not verify this information first-hand.

Granted, the impact may be negligible if you compare to Subversion (which 
has an overhead of 100% for any checkout), but it's huge if you compare 
to Git.

One advantage I heard about Mercurial was its compression. Again, not 
verified first hand.

>Feature-wise, I think Git and Mercurial are pretty similar to each
>other. On the portability, though, Mercurial may have an advantage
>because it's written in Python and plain C, and works seamlessly on
>Windows. There's a TortoiseHg in development, too.

Well, git is C and Perl -- and a lot of shell scripts.

>Of course, the general workflow is the same as with Git or Bazaar. You
>clone a remote repo, and most of the time you clone it again to keep a
>clean clone of the remote. Mercurial hardlinks the files that constitute
>the repo, so cloning locally is really cheap. You commit locally then
>make the changesets available. There's an extension to send a batch of
>changesets in emails with all sorts of options (in the body or attached,
>as clear text or in the compressed format of Mercurial, with the log
>message aside, with diffstat output, etc.). Personally, I find it rather
>easy to setup a CGI in my ~/public_html for each of my public repos.

Hardlinking is very interesting.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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