news from the topic experiment

Pierre-Yves David pierre-yves.david at ens-lyon.org
Fri Sep 23 00:01:11 UTC 2016



On 09/22/2016 10:09 PM, Jun Wu wrote:
> Could we consider storing the topic of a changeset elsewhere so it's not
> part of the changeset metadata? This will make it more lightweight and
> help preserve hashes with remote peers.

One could definitely consider it. I've never been thrilled with having 
the topic as part of the hash. I agree if makes it more heavy weight 
that I would like to create and rename them. Not having them part of the 
hash with part of my initial criteria for a lightweight solution.

However, when Matt, Augie and I were discussing topic somewhere in 
Minneapolis last year, Augie made a good case for storing them in the 
changesets at least until someone come with something better. Having 
them part of extra is solving many of hard problems right away:

* We already how to discover and exchange them (just reuse changeset and 
named branch discovery)

* We already can track history of changes (just reuse evolution related 
data)

* We can handle rename, cyclic rename and and divergent rename (just 
reuse evolution related feature set).

The last one is especially important because this is one of the main 
issue with bookmark. The life cycle is messy, conflict are annoying to 
express/resolve and propagation of all that is a hell.

So, yes ideally I would be happy with an ever lighter-weight solution. 
However given the vast amount of critical advantage we gain from this 
-in-extra- solutions it is unlikely we can divert our scarce resources 
to build a whole better solution.

But sure if someone show up with a solid alternative and his willing to 
implement it. It would certainly get the attention it deserve.

Cheers,

-- 
Pierre-Yves David



More information about the Mercurial-devel mailing list