Mercurial

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What I’d like to see is more people using version tracking systems.

With these you have a discussion which can be merged easily when it gets branched. I use it for anything I do, and I could use it together with an only-windows-and-GUI user with ease, installing TortoiseHG for both and Lyx for him (LaTeX made easy – you don’t have to see the sources).

• http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
• http://www.lyx.org/

Why?

What I miss in the internet is the notion of being able to control what my apps access for data.

Why can’t a chat application just connect to a neighborhood- or community-server, and why can’t the activity-stream come from the people I know — and query only their systems, like jabber does?

Almost all geolocation services should be implementable over direct friend-to-friend connections like jabber, and I don’t really see why my local identi.ca program can’t also get the news from my local jabber contacts.

Downloading the Repository

After installing TortoiseHG, you can download a repository to your computer by right-clicking in a folder and selecting the menu "TortoiseHG" and then "Clone" in there (currently you still need Windows for that - all other dialogs can be evoked in GNU/Linux on the commandline via "hgtk").

Right-Click menu, Windows:

Goal

A workflow where the repository gets updated only from repositories whose heads got signed by at least a certain percentage or a certain number of trusted committers.

Requirements

Mercurial, two hooks for checking and three special files in the repo.

The hooks do all the work - apart from them, the repo is just a normal Mercurial repository. After cloning it, you only need to setup the hooks to activate the workflow.

Extensions: gpg

Hooks: prechangegroup and pretxnchangegroup

Das Repository herunterladen

Wenn du TortoiseHG installiert hast, kannst du dir das Repository auf den Rechner laden, indem du in einem Ordner rechtsklickst und im Menü "TortoiseHG" die Option "Clone" wählst (Aktuell brauchst du für den Dialog noch Windows, die anderen gibt es auch in GNU/Linux).

Rechtsklick-Menü, Windows:

Clone, GNU/Linux:

We (nelchael and me) just finished a live ebuild for Mercurial which allows to conveniently track the main (mpm) repo of Mercurial in Gentoo.

To use the ebuild, just add

=dev-util/mercurial-9999 **  

to your package.keywords and emerge mercurial (again).

There is now a new Mercurial extension called "infocalypse" (which should keep working after the information apocalypse - the link needs a locally running freenet to work).

It offers "fn-push" and "fn-pull" as an optimized way to store code in freenet: bundles are inserted and pulled one after the other. An index tells infocalypse in which order to pull the bundles. It makes using Mercurial in freenet far more efficient and convenient.

Also you can use it to publish collaborative anonymous websites like the freefaq and Technophob.

And it is a perfect fit for the workflow automatic trusted group of committers.

Otherwise it offers the same features as FreenetHG.

Mercurial is a distributed source control management tool.

With it you can save snapshots of your work on documents and go back to these at all times.

Also you can easily collaborate with other people and use Mercurial to easily merge your work.

Written in the Mercurial mailing list

Hi Bernard,

Am Dienstag 03 Februar 2009 20:19:14 schrieb ... ...:
> Most of the docs I can find seem to assume the reader is familiar with
> existing software developemnt tools and methodologies.
>
> This is not the case for me.

It wasn't for me either, and I can assure you that using Mercurial becomes
natural quite quickly.

Some folks in #mercurial @ freenode.net just repeated the tests, so we have now a bit more stable data.

The evaluation shows the following:

1. Initial clone: hg is about 4.4 times faster (about 2 min vs. 6 to 15 min)
2. Repository sizes: the hg repo is about 1.92 smaller (~113M vs. 215M)
3. Time for a full log: hg is about 2.36 times faster (~21s vs. ~50s)
4. Time for annotating Misc/NEWS: hg is 1.5 times slower than bzr.
   Without the result from bzr-1.6.1 it is 2.6 times slower (~43s vs 17s).
5. Integrity checking: hg is by several orders of magnitude faster than bzr which just took too long - everyone stopped it after varying time (30s to 17 min), because the output spoke of hours remaining, one had an integrity error. hg needed about 1 min.
6. Local clone: hg is 11 times faster (39s vs. 7.14 min).
   Without the 1m15 result from the high disk load host it is 16 times faster (26s).
7. Local clone with hot filesystem: hg is 14.9 times faster (26s vs. 6.5 min).
8. Hot copy of just .bzr / .hg: The speeds are about equal, so the difference doesn't come from raw filesystem speed (2s).
9. Additional Bazaar tests to check shared repository cloning performance (you only get this when you use a shared repository and only clone that shared repository): With shared repository and hardlinks bzr only needs about 5 seconds for cloning.