I hate Hg extensions

[Daniel Carrera]

On 07/25/2011 09:34 AM, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
>> We might have different definitions of what is a crying rant, but I
>> won't debate definitions with you. A general rule of thumb is that if
>> one user is angry, there are others like him as well who never bothered
>> to complain on the list and instead just dropped the product altogether.
>
> Honestly, I must say, in your case this wouldn't have been such a big
> loss. We seem to have lots of other users who are both able to get
> things working and make some productive, constructive feedback, or even
> send fixes or edit wikis (you don't even have to ask to edit any wiki page).

Two points:

1. For every angry, ranting user there are usually several non-ranting 
but angry users who didn't bother to rant and just left. Those are the 
ones I was talking about.

2. I don't remember seeing a problem with any wiki. Most of the Tortoise 
site is not a wiki, and in any case, their site was not my #1 complaint.


> What about writing such a README then for TortoiseHg and sending a patch
> for TortoiseHg? It seems other people don't have problems sending a
> patch for such a thing...

No problem. If someone can tell me how to install tortoise from source 
(e.g. dependencies and what-not) I will *honestly* be happy to write a 
README and submit it. I will put my GCC work on hold in order to turn 
the instructions I receive into a README and I'll submit it. In the 
process, I hope to even get thg working in my own system.


> You could actually start helping us to help you by responding to the
> question that TortoiseHg developer Yuya Nishihara asked you. I still
> haven't seen you responding to that...


Sorry, I hadn't realized that I had missed a question. It is not my 
intention to ignore anybody and I try to provide all information 
required. What was the question I missed?


> I think by now we really all got what you hate. But other than that, we
> haven't yet made that much progress on anything. If you really care
> about the Mercurial and TortoiseHg projects (which I still assume), you
> would try improving the progress to noise ratio. At the moment, at my
> end, it looks more like your priority is trying to make sure that
> TortoiseHg looks crappy -- for whatever reason. Using "I hate XXX" in
> subjects certainly would serve that purpose.

The subject says "I hate Hg extensions". Ok, I used the word "extension" 
wrong, but anyway, I do think poorly of the 3rd party ecosystem around 
Mercurial and that is what my title conveys. I am sorry if it is harsh, 
but the title is honest and I stand by it. I do hate them and while my 
might be wrong, I do think they are the largest stumbling block for 
Mercurial because Mercurial itself has always worked like a charm for me.



> Sometimes, restaurants have to deal with "customers" loudly ranting
> about soufflés. But the chef doesn't really know what their agenda is.
>
> In our case, the restaurant seems to be pretty busy serving lots of
> customers with an amazingly low level of noise. So menus don't seem to
> be that bad for users.

There is a problem with that line of thinking: You never hear about the 
people who just quit. They are invisible. It is not surprising that most 
people in this list would be people who are happy with Mercurial. If 
they weren't happy, they would not be likely to be on this list.

Consider a different point of view:  Do you think that Mercurial is used 
as widely as a product of its quality deserves? Compared to other open 
source SCMs like Git and Subversion. You might disagree with me, but I 
would have expected that Mercurial would be more widely used than (say) 
Git because it is just better. Maybe it's just an issue of marketing or 
just bad luck. Or maybe there are real problems that make projects 
discard Mercurial and you never hear about them.


> And last but not least, in this group of restaurants we still assume
> good faith, even though it's hard at times :-)

Rest assured that I don't have ill intentions.


Daniel.
-- 
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.