hg and branches (Re: [Yum-devel] [Patch] Resolver Performance and Correctness)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 13:37 -0400, Charlie Brady wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, Tim Lauridsen wrote:
> > I have tried bot hg and git, hg seams easier to use at first look, but tools 
> > like Cogito[1] makes git easier to use.
> > both ones will be fine with me. What troubles me a little, is the warning 
> > Jesse[2] sent about hg.
> >
> > Tim
> > [1] : http://git.or.cz/cogito/
> > [2]: https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum-devel/2007-May/003630.html
> 
> Quoting:
> 
>    However, yum makes heavy use of branches.  In my experiences, branching
>    with Mercurial is not exactly a fun prospect.
> 
> Can someone qualify what "yum makes heavy use of branches" means?

We have a lot of past branches where we still do development and push
changes to the branches.  

> AIUI, hg doesn't really need to elegantly deal with lots of branching. You 
> fork a clone of the repo, then merge patch sets from one to the other as 
> you wish.

Yes, traditionally the way hg has dealt with branches has been "make
another copy of the repo".  This isn't exactly the ideal workflow,
though, as it makes diffing things off of branches a bit more
work-intensive.  git has functionality for in-repo branches and hg has
(relatively) recently gained this as well; unfortunately, hg's in-repo
branching doesn't exactly work like one would hope :-/

Jeremy