On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:21:39PM +0000, Vegard Øye wrote:
Yeah, speaking of selfish interest, the main selling point for a distributed version control system is of course that it may make contributing code easier. ("Contributors are the lifeblood of Vimpulse." -- rev. 30 commit message)
The main problem with distributed version control as of now is there's too many contenders. Git? Mercurial? Bazaar? Darcs? Monotone? At least everyone's familiar with SVN, and TortoiseSVN is pretty mature (while TortoiseHg has some rough edges by comparison). Git may be confusing to a Mercurial user, and vice versa ...
Yeah, well... I already feel kinda ridiculous preaching about Git, but... I really think it pays off, for everyone, to look into Git. Especially because of Git's branches. It's such a delight -- and it's really so simple when you get the basics (which are really simple, too). And of course, nothing beats Git's speed, featureset and reliability out of the box (i.e. in Hg or Bazaar you can get *some* of the functionality using plugins; which may break (I'm speaking from experience here), as they're not (all?) developed with the core). Also, both Hg and Bazaar being written in Python, you can sometimes get bitten by encoding issues (again that's my own experience with Hg). But whatever, you can always praise or bash anything as you like and it might be largely a matter of personal preference. It's Git's branches what makes it really different. Hg's branches are a bad joke in comparison (you can't really have a private branch without committing it and thus recording it in the history forever) -- the recommended Hg workflow is to have multiple repositories instead, which totally sucks in multiple ways (like having to adjust the paths when testing etc.). Bzr might support more workflows, but I think the branch concept is similar to Hg. Fortunately (for Git afficionados) there is an easy way to use Git with Mercurial; not sure about Bzr and Darcs -- I don't think there is currently any easy way.
I am the maintainer of viper-in-more-modes.el, so let's do some preliminary tests. Assembla space:
http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/viper-in-more-modes
I added Mercurial to the space and ran
hg convert http://svn6.assembla.com/svn/viper-in-more-modes hg update
to create a local Mercurial repository from SVN. Then, using TortoiseHg's Synchronize screen, I pushed that repository to the official one, below:
http://hg.assembla.com/viper-in-more-modes
There were some access restrictions initially, but I think they are sorted out now. Would you mind testing the Mercurial repository? Can you tell me if the conversion was successful?
Yes, looks fine here. Štěpán