news from the topic experiment

[Denis Laxalde]

Gregory Szorc a écrit :
> There are still some areas for improving topics.
>
> 1) `hg log` still shows *all* changesets in the repository. This is
> confusing for users that don't want to be burdened with the complexity
> of multiple heads. I'd like the behavior of `hg log` to only show
> ancestors - and possibly descendants - of the working directory
> changeset when the working directory changeset is unpublished and has a
> topic. If we show descendants, we should delimit the current changeset
> somehow, possibly by making -G or a mode like it the default in this
> scenario. Realistically, I think `hg log` should behave like `hg log -f`
> and `hg log --children` should supplement that with descendants and a
> marking of the wdir changeset. If there is a branch point in the
> descendants, we should automatically add the graphical view because
> showing changesets from multiple DAG heads without the graphical view is
> really confusing. I can also make the argument that the graphical view
> should always be shown so merge commits can be rendered properly.

It seems to me that, if we consider topics as lightweight *branches*, we
can improve (part of) this :

* when on a topic, `hg log` could only show changesets in the current
topic (and their public ancestors);

* when not on a topic, a bare `hg log` could only show changesets
without a topic;

* with an additional -t/--topic option to log command, we could see
changesets of a particular topic even we not activated.

Basically, just like with named branches, I think.


If we follow the same idea (topics are branches), why not considering
make `hg pull` behave differently with topics?

I would imagine that `hg pull` will not fetch any changeset with a
topic unless the client is on a topic that got updated remotely. But,
the server response could list information about available topics,
something like:

    remote: new topics "bugfix1", "newfeature22"
    remote: new changes in topics "foo"
    remote: topics "importbugfix", "docstringtypo" got published

And add a -t/--topic option to `hg pull` to explicitly pull some topic(s).

Here, this diverges from `hg pull` behavior with respect to named
branches (all branches are pulled by default). But this might be an
occasion to "fix" things?

-- 
Denis Laxalde
Logilab         http://www.logilab.fr