[Python-Dev] Hg: inter-branch workflow

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Mar 21, 2011, at 11:56 AM, Daniel Stutzbach wrote:
> 
> People love it because it's a very powerful tool.  People hate it because it allows you to shoot yourself in the foot.

There's a certain irony in this.   The original motivation for version control
was to be a safety rope, to serve as a productivity tool to make sure
that work never got lost.

Now we seem to be advocating a complex, fragile workflow that
is hard to learn, hard to get right, that let's you shoot yourself in 
the foot, and that has rebasing/collapsing steps that destroy and 
rewrite history (an possibly muck-up your repo if there was an
intervening push).

If we gave-up on the "svnmerge on steroids workflow",
the use of Hg would become dirt simple.   I've used it that way
in personal projects for a couple months and it is 
remarkably easy, taking only minutes to learn.
It also works with Hg right out of the box; no need
for extensions, customizations, or a slew of advanced Hg
features.

If someone has to completely master nuances of Hg
to follow the required workflow, then we're doing it wrong.

ISTM, there has been substantial mission creep from 
the workflow described in the PEP.  If the current workflow
had been described there, I don't think it would have been
readily accepted.


Raymond




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