Re: [Boost-users] What's happened to Ryppl?

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] What's happened to Ryppl?
From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-28 06:09:41

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 6:34 PM, Anthony Williams <anthony.ajw_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Dean Michael Berris <mikhailberis_at_[hidden]> writes:
>>
>>
>> I have to be honest here and say up front that I have no idea what the
>> features of mercurial are, so I have some questions with it in
>> particular:
>
> For a quick summary of the similarities and differences, see
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1598759/git-and-mercurial-compare-and-contrast
>

Thanks for the link -- that was a pretty long accepted answer. :)

>> 1. Does it allow for integrating GnuPG signatures in the commit
>> messages/history? The popular way for certifying that something is
>> "official" or "is signed off on by <insert maintainer here>" is
>> through GnuPG PKI. This is what makes the Linux kernel dev
>> organization more like a self-organizing matter.
>
> Yes. See http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GpgExtension
>

Okay.

>> 2. Does it allow for compacting and local compression of assets? Git
>> has a rich set of tools for compressing and dealing with local
>> repositories. It also has a very efficient way of preserving objects
>> across branches and what not.
>
> Mercurial does compress the repository. How it compares with git, I
> don't know.
>

Okay.

>> 3. Does mercurial work in "email" mode? Git has a way of submitting
>> patches via email -- and have the same email read-in by git and parsed
>> as an actual "merge". This is convenient for discussing patches in the
>> mailing list and preserving the original message/discussion. This
>> gives people a chance to publicly review the changes and import the
>> same changeset from the same email message.
>
> >From Mercurial, you can export patches to a text file containing the
> diffs and a few headers, and import that text file into another repo,
> where it preserves the commit message. Is that the sort of thing you
> meant?
>

Well, not really -- git has git-format-patch that actually crafts an
appropriately encoded email message. Git actually has support for
importing patches from a mail message directly.

>> 4. How does mercurial deal with forks? In Git a repository is
>> automatically a fork of the source repository. I don't know whether
>> every mercurial repo is the same as a Git repo though -- meaning
>> whether the same repository can be exposed to a number of protocols
>> and dealt with like any other Git repo (push/pull/merge/compact, etc.)
>
> Your local repository can push/pull from any remote repository, and you
> can set up a default remote repo for "hg push" and "hg pull" without a
> repository path. I don't know the full set of protocol options; I use
> local and http access.
>

Okay, but I think the thing I was asking was whether the same two
repositories share the same history information?

>>
>> I've used Msysgit for the most part, and it works very well --
>> actually, works the same in Linux as it does in Windows. Are we
>> talking about the same Windows port of Git?
>
> The old port was cygwin based, and was a real pain. I tried using
> msysgit and had a few problems, but it was an early version. It might be
> much better now. OTOH, Mercurial has always "just worked" for me, on
> both Windows and Linux.
>

Ok.

> Like I said above, my personal opinion is that mercurial is easier to
> use. YMMV. I also know people who a big fans of bazaar, but I've never
> used it myself.
>

I agree.

However since hg and git can work with each other, I don't see why
using either one would be a big problem as both have a pretty similar
model looking at it from the outside. I'd love to hear from someone
who uses bzr though.

Thanks again Anthony!

-- 
Dean Michael Berris
about.me/deanberris