compatibility between hg and thg versions

[Mads Kiilerich]

This discussion should perhaps take place on the mercurial packaging 
list ... or enjoy the larger audience here (or rather on -devel) and be 
mentioned/summarized on the packaging list.

On 11/05/2012 01:29 PM, Neal Becker wrote:
> Hi, I maintain hg on Fedora.  I always have an issue with updating hg, because I
> need to be sure I'm not breaking something in the process.  AFAIK, the only
> thing which is depending on hg is tortoisehg (thg).

There is also gwsmhg and (not officially packaged for Fedora) hgview. 
Plus all kinds of extensions that users might have installed manually or 
from some package.

It is explicitly stated that Mercurial is unstable for anything that 
integrates deeply. But there are good(?) reasons to integrate deeply 
with Mercurial. It is not always feasible to use the command line or the 
command server.

Mercurial is thus de facto quite hostile to packaging. Especially for 
distributions that try to ship only one version of each component and 
make sure everything is compatible.

tortoisehg integrates deeply with Mercurial and do thus have built-in 
version checks that wisely doesn't promise compatibility with future 
Mercurial versions.

tortoisehg releases often lack behind Mercurial releases, sometimes a 
few days, sometimes several weeks. I'm sure more developers would be 
very welcome.

> How can I (with minimial effort) ensure I don't break thg by updating to an
> incompatible hg version?

The necessary and minimal effort is thus to take the effort to
* take care
* coordinate package updates with other packages
* don't make major automatic updates in stable OS releases

- but you already know that. Just do it.

The implied question whether it really has to be hard so hard is quite 
relevant but futile.

/Mads