[Catalog-sig] Mercurial

[Éric Araujo]

> After using Mercurial in one project, I'm skeptical that this really 
> makes things simpler. I find it very hard to find out what changes a 
> specific clone has that I still need to integrate.

There are commands to compare repositories: incoming and outgoing (read
“hg help incoming”).

> Also, when merging with conflicts, I find it very difficult to determine
> whether I merged all the conflicts correctly (since the diff will show
> all changes, not just the conflicts).

I believe that’s a known bug. David Wolever is writing an extension to
show only the diff against the automated merge, which would be more
helpful: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MergediffExtension
Bitbucket uses a similar algo to display merge diffs, I think.

With the command-line tool or TortoiseHg, you can check the diff against
the second parent of the merge, which can be more meaningful than the
default diff against the first parent.

We will definitely need tutorials to make the transition smooth. More
advanced users are on python-dev and #python-dev and bugs.python.org to
help newcomers, so don’t hesitate to complain about Mercurial.

BTW, the willingness to learn a new tool in such a fundamental area as
version control tells you’re not so old. <wink> hginit.com is a really
short tutorial that starts with version control reeducation for
Subversion users.

Regards