[PATCH] help: add "glossary" topic

[Greg Ward]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:13 PM, timeless <timeless at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca> wrote:
>> I'm not keen on the bureaucratic style here.  Makes it read like a
>> military procedural manual.  I would prefer
>
> The reason we did this was because we wanted to group related topics
> together, and they were generally the last word in a string.

I assumed that was the reasoning.  I just wanted to put in my vote for
a more natural style with lots of "see also" links.

>>  Extensions which appear to change history actually create new changesets
>>  that replace existing ones, and then destroy the old changesets.
>
> Not to bikeshed too  much, but i wonder if there's a word that would
> be better than 'replace' ("supplant" is what comes to mind, and I
> don't want to suggest that for an international audience).

"Supersede" was good too -- that was the original.  Should be clear to
anyone who knows their Latin: "super" = over, "sedere" = to sit;
hence, "to sit above", which is what those new changesets created by
rebase or histedit or MQ do for the split-second that they exist at
the same time as the old ones.

Nothing against "supplant", but honestly I think "replace" is both
clear and accurate.  Consider the situation *after* rebase is finished
successfully: the old changeset is gone, and there's a new one in its
place that has the same patch in a different context.  It's a straight
replacement.

>>> +    Each changeset has a manifest, which is the list of files that are
>>> +    tracked by the changeset.
>>
>> How about: "...list of files and file revisions that are included in
>> the changeset"?
>
> That's relatively different from what the author of that item was
> thinking. The line item clearly didn't consider the file revisions. --
> I'm not opposed, I just haven't personally thought about what the
> manifest is / how it works, or how I'd want it explained to me as an
> end user.

1) run "hg manifest --debug"
2) realize that the 40-digit ID in the leftmost column is a file revision ID

And *boom* you understand the manifest.  It's that simple.  That's
what I was trying to do.

Greg