Using bookmarks in Mercurial itself

[Pierre-Yves David]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 01:08:14PM +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:

> > I thought the whole point of sending patches to the list is to have a
> > discussion and let others review -before- committing stuff.
> 
> That is the purpose and the result is a pretty nice history in
> Mercurial: very linear and very good commits.
> 
> But don't you also think that it is strange that we have such a fine
> tool available and then we're still hesitant to commit things for real?
>

Committing half-baked commit add a lot a noise. Greatly reducing audit and
bisect possibility. I would refer to my talk at the 1.9 sprint, we want the tip
most part of the history to be easily mutable not a crappy history of changeset
backouting one another.

Currently mercurial have some history rewriting capability but no proper
solution to easily share this mutable part with other. (the only current option
is versionned MQ).

To be able to easily share and work together on the mutable section of the
history we need the same tool than we set up to share and work together on
file:

    **We want some mechanism to version changeset**

As explained in my talk this changeset history better be perpendicular to the
file history.

> It's of course just a gut feeling, but I feel that a DVCS should allow
> us to commit and experiment more freely than we do today.

I'm working on state//obsolete concept to add some capability to mercurial. You
are free to join me in the effort.

>   hg merge --hide-second-parent feature-x


During discussion about keeping history clean but sharing mutable part of the
history, this proposal (to have merge considered as single changeset) are often
suggested. The main limitation of this approach is that is make it hard to
split your work in small, clean, atomical changeset easy to review and prevent
reordoring your change.

I see the "hide-second-parent" as hacky method to get a "poor man rewritable"
history. I'll insist that in my opinion the way to got is perpendicular history
for changeset. I, again, encourage anyone interressed to join me in the effort.


-- 
Pierre-Yves David

http://www.logilab.fr/

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