New evolve docs, take 2: 1/3: index.rst

Martin Geisler martin at geisler.net
Sat May 31 19:56:03 UTC 2014


Greg Ward <greg at gerg.ca> writes:

> On 31 May 2014, Martin Geisler said:
>> I'm actually confused why you would call one safer than the other.
>> Safety doesn't seem like the diffenting factor to me. Both mechanisms
>> leave the data behind: strip places the old data in external bundle
>> files and evolve leaves the data in the repository, but marked obsolete.
>
> I'm not sure who started using the phrase "safe mutable history". I'm
> pretty sure it wasn't me; I just adopted it because it's a nice
> tagline. Beats "mutable history without fiddly little bundle files
> that you lose track of because the filenames are unhelpful". ;-)
>
> IMHO "safe" describes both phases (you can't rebase/amend/etc.
> published changesets) and obsolescence (old changesets are still in
> your repository).

Thinking about this more, I think "safe" refers more to "safe from
getting you into a mess" in the sense that evolve can handle rewrites
after a push -- unlike normal Mercurial and Git, both of which just give
up and offer no help with untangling the mess.

> Anyways, I completely agree with you that the old strip model isn't
> unsafe per se. I just think obsolescence is safer.
>
> I do want to make sure that the new docs describe the new way. There
> is no need to describe how strip works in the docs for evolve; it's
> just irrelevant.

Fully agreed! The new tools are much superior to the old way of doing
things and should get all the attention.

-- 
Martin Geisler

http://google.com/+MartinGeisler
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