Are you using evolve.serveronly and serverminitopic extensions?

[Anton Shestakov]

Hello, users of Mercurial, Evolve and/or Topic!

Some of you may be using the following server-only extensions: 
evolve.serveronly and serverminitopic, that live in the same repo as 
regular evolve extension: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve

These extensions were used by Bitbucket when it still supported 
Mercurial, because they were very lightweight and supported the minimum 
logic required for proper changeset exchange and obsmarker discovery 
(for example), but without any extra bits like new hg commands in CLI.

Back in the day, people chose these extensions because in theory they 
would have lower risk of breaking things; after all, evolve and topic do 
have some experimental features. However, it currently seems that 
evolve.serveronly and serverminitopic aren't tested (neither by our test 
suite nor by the users) as extensively as the main evolve and topic 
extensions, which in the recent years became much more polished after 
being test-driven daily in real circumstances on real projects by both 
the developers and the users (who are also developers sometimes (:).

So if you use evolve.serveronly and serverminitopic, we would really 
suggest you to switch to evolve and topic on the server side. The good 
news is that this shouldn't have any adverse effects on your setup.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them in a response to 
this email, or starting a separate thread on this mailing list, or 
emailing me directly. Also we're on IRC: #mercurial on libera.chat, 
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/IRC

The bad news is that while preparing a feature release candidate, we 
noticed that it's no longer viable to add features and cover them by 
tests in multiple extensions, so we're going to deprecate 
evolve.serveronly and serverminitopic in the coming release candidate 
and then REMOVE BOTH extensions in the coming feature release.

If you really cannot switch to the main extensions in your server setup, 
you will still be able to use the old extensions from evolve 10.5.3, but 
obviously they won't support newer features that are coming soon.

If you're interested in testing the new features from the release 
candidate (and/or knowing why this feature release needs an rc at all, 
which is unusual for evolve), I have sent another email to this mailing 
list about evolve 11.0.0 and topic 1.0.0.