[Distutils] [distribute] Python 3 support checked in, and fucked everything up.

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Georg Brandl<g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> Lennart Regebro schrieb:
>> 2009/7/18 Hanno Schlichting <hanno at hannosch.eu>:
>> OK, that solved that problem. It's annoying that you can't delete
>> branches so they won't show up. OK, you can inactivate them, but the
>> default is to list all, and you have to type --active to not list the
>> inactive ones. That's just daft. It means that if you make a mistake,
>> like I did, you have to basically live with that mistake, and you
>> can't prune old branches in any reasonable way.

Lennart, if you don't like the default then just add the following to
your hgrc file:

[defaults]
branches = --active

Mercurial just got the explicit notion of "closing" branches in
version 1.2, which seems to be made exactly for this use-case. You
want to see less clutter in the branches list.

> I'm sure that this discussion will be welcome on the mercurial mailing list.
> Maybe they haven't given their branches as much thought as you have.

>From what I can tell, using named branches seems to be considered
advanced and unusual in Mercurial. There's no need to give different
heads names at all and using entirely different clones seems more
usual. It's just those pesky SVN converts, which are so used to using
branches.

>> Anyway. I found that with the mqextension strip you seem to be able to
>> delete branches.
>> I'd be happy to delete all my changes this way, and start over, this
>> seems doable. (It's not much work).
>> But before I do this, I would like confirmation that I should do this.
>> I think it's a good idea. The python3 branch is broken now anyway.
>
> Note that you cannot push "stripped" changesets.  strip destructively alters
> the history, and while that's a good thing as long as you only do it locally,
> it would have detrimental effects on other clones, which e.g. could have
> new changesets based on those you stripped.  So once you pushed a changeset,
> and you really want to get rid of it, you must tell everyone who has a clone
> to do the strip as well (starting with Jesper at bitbucket), or risk getting
> contributions that reintroduce these changesets.

Yes. Please don't try to strip anything. Just because you seem to be
able to do this, doesn't make this a good idea.

How often did you manually alter SVN repositories to erase some part
of their history? It's for the rare case where highly confidential
information leaked or otherwise extreme cases - not for beautifying
the log. Learn to live with your mistakes ;-)

Hanno