news from the topic experiment

[David Demelier]

2016-09-14 21:14 GMT+02:00 Pierre-Yves David <pierre-yves.david at ens-lyon.org>:
> In the past couple of weeks I made a couple of extra changes to the topic
> experiment,
>
> 'hg topic --verbose' got a large update and now list various information
> about the topics, this should help people getting a grasp on the current
> state of they topic in a single command:
>
> The most notable change is probably the creation of the 'hg stack' command.
> The 'hg stack' command display comprehensive information about all
> changesets in your current topic.
>
>
> The topic extension also gained some raw documentation about its various
> features, its not great but is better than nothing. Feel free to send patch
> to improve it.
>
> reminder, the extension can be found there:
>
>   https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/topic-experiment/

Hello,

Disclaimer: this will be totally subjective.

Branches, bookmarks, topics. Too much ways to do something in Mercurial.

When I started using Mercurial, there was only branches and it was
fine. Then we introduced bookmarks to simulate git branches and it
works mostly fine too. But it has increased the learning curve and
added new workflows. For the end user, it's not very easy to start and
learn all these things and when I should use that, or this or
whatever.

Now topics, yet another new way of working. A new question may arise:
when to use topics, when to use bookmarks, when to use branches?

I think we really should improve what is existing (understand
bookmarks) instead of creating new Mercurial commands. Mercurial
always had the reputation of being easy to learn. The upcoming evolve
will already add new commands and it seems that topics will also
introduce new commands. I'm not sure if the reputation of being easy
will stay :-).

I if recall correctly, someone on the #mercurial channel told me that
topics requires a non-publishing repository. If it's true, for me it's
a reason to not use topics.

What I'm really in hurry to see, is the journal extension to have a
better bookmark workflow :-)

Regards,

-- 
Demelier David