Why we didn't migrate to Mercurial (long)

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

At Mon, 8 Oct 2012 20:16:46 -0700,
Hi Victor,

Victor Suba wrote:
> I remember reading that because of the way Hg stores tags in a per-branch
> manner, then retrieving
> the tags involves looking through all branches, or something to that effect.

That could be, yes. Though it should only apply for non-merged branches - at least theoretically.
 
> I don't know exactly tbh, but when considering whether to start using a
> system for the long term then
> that kind of performance warning is off putting.

Yepp, so we should really check it and put numbers to it. Sadly I
don't have the time to do it at the moment.

> Anyway, bookmarks are now quite workable since 2.1.  I still prefer the way
> that in Git, fetching from remotes automatically pulls remote branches into
> a remotes namespace which can then be updated to at leisure.  It's a bit
> more flexible than 'hg incoming'.

That is true - though its not hard to do the same in hg: In my site
extension (which sadly is broken right now due to a 2.3 API change), I
added fork-detection by just prefetching all incoming changes into
.hg/paths/...

We could do the same for all repos named in paths and add all the
remote tracking logic from git with quite little effort. Seeing
changes would then just be a set of hg incoming calls to local clones
or bundles.

Best wishes,
Arne