Diffly going all unpredictable?

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:00:19 +0100

Okay so lately I've either been too busy, too tired, too lazy, or too ill to work on Diffly. There are a few bugs that need debugging, a few features that need enfeaturing, and a 1.0 release. One thing standing in the way of that is that, since leaving Cominded, I'm not using Subversion day to day so the shortcomings aren't in my face a lot.

Also for my latest project I have been playing with Mercurial which is a distributed version control system along the lines of Darcs and Git.

The distributed part comes from the fact that all three, unlike Subversion, eschew the idea of a central repository. Essentially everyone maintains (potentially multiple) masters and pushes and pulls changes between them. It turns out this has all sorts of advantages.

I choose Mercurial over Darcs and Git because I found it the easiest to get going with although I know a lot of smart people are choosing Git and uber-smart Haskell people probably use Darcs out of principle. Steve Dekorte mentioned a couple of problems that Git may suffer relative to Darcs.

Never having used Git I've no idea if he's right. I asked the question in #mercurial and was told that the cherry-picking at least should be possible using the Transplant extension. Although the HgBook is a little vague on this point:

14.3 Cherrypicking changes with the transplant extension

Need to have a long chat with Brendan about this.

14.4 Send changes via email with the patchbomb extension

Hrmm... maybe Brendan was out. Let's hope he gets back sometime soon.

Anyway the reason for my dissembling about Mercurial was that I was thinking about extending Diffly to work with Mercurial. In many respects the commands and their output are very similar. There would be some work to do, in particular it's annoying that Mercurial doesn't support the --targets options of Subversion. That could be an issue when checking in a lot of files.

Would anyone else be interesting in a Cocoa interface to browsing & committing changes with Mercurial?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on mercurial

Diffly going all unpredictable?

14.3 Cherrypicking changes with the `transplant` extension

14.4 Send changes via email with the patchbomb extension

Curiouser and Curiouser! on mercurial

Diffly going all unpredictable?

14.3 Cherrypicking changes with the transplant extension

14.4 Send changes via email with the patchbomb extension

14.3 Cherrypicking changes with the `transplant` extension