[Python-3000] [OT] Mercurial [was: How to override io.BytesIO ...]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Brett Cannon writes:

 > It is nice.  Once Mercurial hits version 1.0 I am going to look at
 > whether it is reasonable to move Python to hg or bzr to make it easier
 > for people to do development on their own machines with local checkins
 > instead of forcing people who can't create a branch to create their
 > own VCS solution when doing offline work.

My project just switched to Mercurial and the frequent merges are
driving me nuts.

Mercurial *is* nice because you can just do what comes naturally,
commit your own code when it makes sense to you, pull from upstream
when you think of it, and Mercurial will automatically make a branch
(but Mercurial calls it a "new head", Mercurial "branches" are either
something slightly heavier weight or a whole new repo).  And, it won't
let you push without complaining if you would create a new head in a
remote repository.

The downside is that the usual way of resolving the "Mercurial won't
let me push" situation is to do a merge, and that merge will get
committed to the main repo as well.  If you've got an automated commit
notifier, you can easily get hundreds or thousands of lines of useless
diffs this way.  We're thinking about just filtering those in the
commit notifier, but haven't yet decided that it's harmless to ignore
them.

This may be a local problem, but you may want to think about workflow
to avoid this kind of thing.