news from the topic experiment

[Sean Farley]

Pierre-Yves David <pierre-yves.david at ens-lyon.org> writes:

> On 09/22/2016 10:09 PM, Jun Wu wrote:
>> Could we consider storing the topic of a changeset elsewhere so it's not
>> part of the changeset metadata? This will make it more lightweight and
>> help preserve hashes with remote peers.
>
> One could definitely consider it. I've never been thrilled with having 
> the topic as part of the hash. I agree if makes it more heavy weight 
> that I would like to create and rename them. Not having them part of the 
> hash with part of my initial criteria for a lightweight solution.
>
> However, when Matt, Augie and I were discussing topic somewhere in 
> Minneapolis last year, Augie made a good case for storing them in the 
> changesets at least until someone come with something better. Having 
> them part of extra is solving many of hard problems right away:
>
> * We already how to discover and exchange them (just reuse changeset and 
> named branch discovery)
>
> * We already can track history of changes (just reuse evolution related 
> data)
>
> * We can handle rename, cyclic rename and and divergent rename (just 
> reuse evolution related feature set).

All of these points are really, really, really solid about keeping it in
the commit.

I must again emphasize that this mental model is very simple. A point
that I am painfully (if it's not obvious by now) aware of working at a
place that is trying to build tooling around Mercurial and doesn't have
the ability to edit every user's config file.

I'm just trying to point out the things I've learned over the last year
in as friendly (but serious) way as I can.