Understanding the relationship of mercurial and it's extensions

[John W]

I'm not a maintainer, so can't speak to that, but broadly:

By "adopted it", he might have meant "included it in core Mercurial".
Some extensions are included in that way. There's a list on the
wiki[1].

Looking at hg-git's wiki page[2], you can see it "is not distributed
with Mercurial". So, that *might* be the distinction they were talking
about.

I think the Mercurial devs generally avoid adding more core
extensions. Several of the existing supported ones are only there for
backwards-compatibility. A number of them would probably not make the
cut today, if they were proposed for being included.

Personally, I think this is a good thing — keeps Mercurial modular,
less maintenance burden, etc.

You might want to read the "Using Mercurial Extensions"[3] wiki page;
it has good general info.

Also, it's important to know that extensions use Mercurial's
*internal* API, which is not guaranteed to be stable. So, maintaining
an extension is more work than maintaining something that uses the
public API (which is precisely the CLI). Read more here[4].

-John

[1] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/UsingExtensions#Extensions_bundled_with_Mercurial
[2] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/HgGit
[3] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/UsingExtensions
[4] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/MercurialApi

On 8/28/23, Ernie Rael <errael at raelity.com> wrote:
> I was just communicating with someone who has depended on a mercurial
> repo that mirrors a repo on github. That mirror is going away, I
> suggested he give hg-git a try.
>
> He responded with a question I can't answer
>
>
>> If that hg-git extension you mention is so good, why haven't the
>> Mercurial maintainers adopted it ?
>
> I'm not even sure what he meant by this question (I suggested that maybe
> some of them do). I guess his concern is reliability, and me saying I've
> been using it for years and there's been a lot of work on it lately
> doesn't cut it.
>
> But it did get me thinking about the relationship of things. Any
> suggestions on discovering more about this topic?
>
> -ernie
>
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