[Scons-dev] Scons 2.3.2 regression, D tool...

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2014-08-09 at 13:33 -0400, William Blevins wrote:
> Fair; I realize its non-trivial.  My complaints with Mercurial aren't
> related to one particular event.  It's more a personal preference in tool
> usability.
> 
> If HG suites the needs of the team, I'll just have to muddle through it.
> 
> Again, you are right.  This issue has nothing to do with Mercurial.
> 
> Sorry,

Please don't apologise for raising a perfectly reasonable point, there
is nothing wrong with that.

The history of this is that Python went with Mercurial and Steven wanted
to go with Mercurial, so we went with Mercurial. At the time it seemed
fine and reasonable and I had no problem with it. And in many ways still
don't even though I prefer Git for the remote tracking branches and
transient internal feature branches. (Well actually I still prefer
Bazaar, but that is now an ex-DVCS, given it's level of support since
Canonical have dropped funded support.)

The core issue here is that Mercurial enforces maintaining the names of
branches in all repositories. Thus the technique of internal feature
branches fails with Mercurial. This leads to having branches only for
long lived things such as maintenance branches. Everything else needs to
be on default. This means clones for feature branches or use of
bookmarks (MQ seems to be deprecated in favour of rebase and graft and
things I don't understand about Mercurial – which includes bookmarks).

Our problem is that it seems that maintaining a long running
synchronized clone of a default branch leads Mercurial to having
problems on a final merge. Advice from a Mercurial expert was that
actually the result was fine, just ugly. Gary felt it was an ugly too
far and that we should not use that way of merging. Nothing wrong there
per se. It just brings into stark relief that we do not have a
reasonable workflow just now.

I am getting to the stage of not doing anything because any process I
use leads to problems.

I am thinking that we should use clones for feature branches
synchronizing with the mainline and even publish them but before making
the final pull request perform a full rebase so as to create a pull
request sitting on the current mainline default/tip.

Anatoly had, I believe, an alternative suggestion, but I have forgotten
what it was. As he is more of a Mercurial expert, his suggestion may
well be far more sensible.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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