Questions about contributing

[Dominik Psenner]

>There certainly is for us, but I agree, there's probably not much
>benefit for the community.

Exactly what are the benefits? I did not understand them in the initial
email. :-)

>However, storing the dir name in a variable means that everyone
>writing extensions etc doesn't have to hard-code '.hg' everywhere. Not
>a big deal, but it seems cleaner to me. I'm only passingly familiar
>with python though, so I could have the wrong end of the pythonic
>stick.

One could argue to unify the ".hg" definition into a constant, but it does
not imply that it should EVER be changed. It is just for 

>Surely this is only in issue if Mallory builds her own version of Hg
>from source and purposefully changes the dir name variable? In which
>case, she wouldn't be able to interact with the repository recreated
>by Alice and Bob anyway.

If it's built into mercurial and not configurable things get even worse. One
cannot work on "common" mercurial repositories with the mercurial tool that
is supposed to do exactly that.

>Although I agree it could cause confusion.

.. and serious trouble. Let Mallory do "cp" instead of "mv" to create
"foo/.bar" and things become really inconvenient for Alice and Bob.