[Yum-devel] post 3.2.0 things to think about

[Jesse Keating]

On Thursday 03 May 2007 23:12:28 Tim Lauridsen wrote:
> > In some circles, perhaps. Mercurial is also widely used, very easy to
> > use and does a very good job.
>
> I also like Mercurial too, it is very easy to use.

However, yum makes heavy use of branches.  In my experiences, branching with 
Mercurial is not exactly a fun prospect.  Mercurial works much better if 
instead of creating a branch, you just create a new repo.  That's fine, but 
can spiral a bit out of control.  With in repo branching, you get a situation 
I like to call 'branch bingo'.  Mercurial has the concept of 'tip', that is 
the very last changeset committed to the repo.  This 'tip' can live on any of 
the in repo branches.  When cloning a repo without any special arguments, 
your working copy is 'tip'.  Think about that for a second.  Lets say Seth 
fixes some bug for an older version of yum, used in say RHEL5 (thinking about 
a year or so in the future).  Then somebody clones the yum repo to see what 
things are all about.  They're now staring at the code that was used in 
RHEL5, not the new code that is 1~2 years worth of improvements and changes.  
I find this 'branch bingo' to be somewhat confusing and a roadblock to doing 
any inrepo branches for any thing I manage in Mercurial.

This is just a warning, I have no vested interest in what SCM yum uses.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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