Comments on: Early-stage Git/Mercurial/Bazaar evaluation thoughts

By: jacmoe

jacmoe — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:38:07 +0000

Steve’s leaning towards Mercurial now – read this:
http://www.stevestreeting.com/2009/11/06/dvcs-score-card/

And the topic @ the Ogre forum:
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=53129

By: Tero

Tero — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:09:34 +0000

I made same kind of evaluation for some time ago and my choice was Mercurial: http://alen.mobi/blog/2009/07/30/i-prefer-mercurial/

I have been using Git and I didn’t really like it’s cli interface. After Git I tried Mercurial and it was really pleasant to use because I come from Subversion. I haven’t used any GUI tools for version control, so I can’t say anything about them, but from command line Mercurial rocks

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:51:50 +0000

The -a thing makes a lot of sense to me. It has to do with working in terms of patches. We’ve switched to git at $work and a lot of times, I have a gazillion debugging statements in various files. I want to commit a fix for one of the three variants of the bug I’m working on, but I don’t want to have to back out all the warning statements I’ve added for tracing because I have two more variants to hunt down.

Yes, it takes a little getting used to sometimes. But, that’s not a bad thing.

By: jacmoe

jacmoe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:03:26 +0000

Hint: Use ‘Incoming’ first. It’s like a sneak peak.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:38:55 +0000

Thanks, that’s useful. However I do kind of like to do *just* Pull and then check what changes are before I decide what to do, rather than always rebasing. Especially if I have multiple branches active.

By: jacmoe

jacmoe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:24:48 +0000

In your Mercurial.ini (In Windows, that is – .hgrc on *nix)
put this:
[tortoisehg]
postpull = rebase

This is my list of extensions:
[extensions]
hgext.win32text=
hgext.mq =
transplant=
color =
hgext.bookmarks =

Transplant is great.

By: jacmoe

jacmoe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:21:10 +0000

Ah – I think I got it because I’ve enabled the mq extension.
Yep, that’s it.
You can select the default pull action somewhere in the highly intuitive (not) configuration dialogue.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:53:23 +0000

I definitely did have to enable the extension before I could use ‘hg pull –rebase’ or ‘hg rebase’ on the command line. Standard Mercurial 1.3.1 just says it doesn’t understand the rebase command / option until you do that.

I spotted that THg has the Rebase option in the ‘Pull’ dialog after I posted, but guess what – if you forget to select it during the Pull, you’re stuck. There is no separate Rebase option that I can find in THg, and you can’t repeat the Pull to do it because it does nothing when you’re up to date. The only way to resolve it at that point is to use “hg rebase” on the command-line, which like I say does not work unless you enable the extension.

[edit]I think that the upcoming THg 0.9 supports a separate Rebase and Transplant, which will be welcome since TGit makes these operations much easier.

By: jacmoe

jacmoe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:45:36 +0000

I tried to answer you on Twitter, but here goes:
Rebase is included with Mercurial, and you don’t have to enable it.
When pulling, you have four options: nothing, update, fetch and rebase. It’s in the Synchronise dialogue.
One extension you’d want to enable is hgext.win32text which fixes eol issues.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:37:08 +0000

In practice, I’ve actually found that Git’s cheap, private local branches are fine for handling these cases. I create a local branch or three (which are not linked to any origin branch) and build up unfinished patches there, and then merge them across to my main branch which I push upstream from when they’re ready. Works fine, and the level of control is actually very good. I find this infinitely more useful than the staging area because it’s multidimensional.