news from the topic experiment

[David Demelier]

2016-09-16 18:35 GMT+02:00 Pierre-Yves David <pierre-yves.david at ens-lyon.org>:
> This is a very valid feedback. The start of the topic experiments come from
> the finding that after 5 years of struggle trying to make bookmarks viable,
> they seems too alien to other Mercurial concept to ever work in a
> satisfactory way.

Okay so now I assume bookmarks no longer exist.

First, I've seen a hg stack function, I would suggest naming it
'topics' so it more meaningful and more appropriate since some
commands have plural forms (e.g. tag/tags, branch/branches).

> - If you work on multiple feature at the same time (ie: have multiple
> anonymous/bookmarked heads, you can use topic locally to organize them,

Okay, so to my point of view, local topics seem to work pretty fine
and looks like a good idea. My major disappointment with bookmarks is
the combination of "default" and "@", with topics, you will just need
to hg up default or the-topic. no more @, default and
featured-bookmarks :-)

> - If you do advanced code review and use non-publishing review to exchange
> draft with other people. You can use topics to organize these.
>

This is exactly what I dislike.

You need to use a non-publishing server to share topics. This means I
can rewrite history, delete revisions on the remote when using topics.
Thus, breaking any basic users who just do some hg pull and build.
Those users will not understand why their local repositories are
cluttered with many revisions that does not exist anymore. Probably we
should mix evolve features + topics so that we can use on
non-publishing server?

Personally, I will probably use topics only locally if it will still
requires only draft changesets and do code review with a pre-push
manner using some additional workflow (reviewboard, mailing lists,
etc...)

>> What I'm really in hurry to see, is the journal extension to have a
>> better bookmark workflow :-)
>
>
> Workflow improvements introduce by the journal extensions should also apply
> to topic.
>
>
> Does this clarify the current process around the experiment for you ?
>

Thanks for those explanations :-)

-- 
Demelier David