[implementations-list] style; VCS

Fri Mar 19 22:15:04 CET 2010

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