mercurial for dummies (newbies), remote heads etc

[Pierre-Yves David]

On 5/28/20 8:32 PM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> I would like to ask for advice.
> 
> I do collaborate using mercurial but mostly with single users and that
> works reasonable well, even given that the other person does not really
> understand mercurial.
> 
> Now because of coronovirus I have forced with six colleagues to
> collaborate and proposed mercurial.
> 
> Well two problems/question occur
> 
>      1. They did not take the time to learn the basic so they got
>         confused when some pushes got refused, because of remote
>         anonymous heads (I did not tell them the force option). I tried
>         to explain the merge command but it did not really work out,
>         maybe I should have told them about the fetch command, but if
>         there is a conflicting merge, thinks can get worse.

Do you have details on what's their trouble with merge ? Do they have 
trouble with the concept has a whole ? are they confused about when to 
run the command ? do they have trouble with conflict resolution ? If so, 
which tool to they use.

(side note: having the ability to commit and push conflict would solve 
this usecase)

>         a. So I thought have having used named branches (one collaborator
>            one branch), and I do the merge, but sooner or later similar
>            problems occur.

It is not part of the standard distribution, but topic has a mode to 
automatically assign a topic to any new commit. That would be 
"[experimental] \n topic-mode = random-all". combined with a non 
publishing repository, that would let them push their change while you 
do the merging/publishing.

>      2. What would you guys have proposed?
> 
>      3. I wonder how git deals with this situation, you want to push, but
>         there is already a commit (so in mercurial you would pull and
>         merge) does git do this automatically?

-- 
Pierre-Yves David