Promoting the use of Mercurial; was: Re: gnome dvcs survey results

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 04:29:37PM +0100, Isaac Jurado wrote:
> > BTW, Mercurial really needs to add better support for renaming and
> > deleting branches to best support this particular workflow...
> 
> You mean better support for renaming and delecting bookmarks, right?

Well, if you're going to use bookmarks instead of hg's native
branches, when you need is support for the concept of the "current"
bookmark, so that commits only affect the "current" bookmark, and not
all of the bookmarks that happen to be pointing at thecommit.  Also
needed is support for being able to push and pull bookmarks, so they
can be (optionally) shared beyond the local repository, and the
ability to PGP sign bookmarks.  The first is probably the highest
priority, followed by push/pull of bokmarks and followed next by PGP
signing of bookmarks.

One cool thing is that if there were better support for bookmarks, it
would be much, MUcH easier to be able to support bidrectinal
gatewaying between an hg and git repository, such that changes made on
the hg side of the bridge could be propgated seamlessly to the git
world, and vice versa.  That would be really neat, since it means that
a project's choice on DSCM wouldn't be forced on all of its
developers; you could have some developers using hg, and some using
git, and they would be able to interoperate with each other.

						- Ted