Improving Windows support

TK Soh teekaysoh at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 18:48:55 UTC 2007


On 4/16/07, Lee Cantey <lcantey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd personally like to see more feedback on Windows issues raised on
> the list in general.  I've slowed down Windows snapshots since I
> haven't gotten much feedback and since the regression tests don't run
> natively I'm never quite sure if it's going to be a solid build
> without spending time poking at it.

While it's important to have a fully functional test suite for Windows
for catching regression bugs, the need to have a self-sufficient
Windows package might be as great.

To encourage testing (and acceptance), the installer will have to work
out of the box. Right now it isn't, as users still need to hunt for
the merge tool and get it setup and run. We all know how much trouble
that is. But I guess the worst thing is that users usually don't know
hgmerge needs to be setup until they see the error generated by hg
merge.

Bottom line, we can't have a distributed VCS like Hg without the
capability to merge. So IMO, Hg should provide it's own internal
merging support. For now, perhaps one (written in python?) can be
bundled with the Windows installer. Though some hacking might be
required to make it work 'out of the box'.

Just my 2-cent. The time has come that I really need Hg to work (well)
on Windows to support my work, so you can probably sense my
desperation.



More information about the Mercurial mailing list