news from the topic experiment

Sean Farley sean at farley.io
Thu Sep 22 22:23:08 EDT 2016


Jun Wu <quark at fb.com> writes:

> Excerpts from Sean Farley's message of 2016-09-22 18:18:05 -0700:
>> Jun Wu <quark at fb.com> writes:
>> 
>> > Excerpts from Sean Farley's message of 2016-09-22 17:30:34 -0700:
>> >> Completely false. Take a look at the hgtopics repo:
>> >> 
>> >> $ hg log --debug -vr 093a | grep "\(topic=\|phase\)"
>> >> phase:       public
>> >> extra:       topic=stackheader
>> >
>> > I admit I didn't look into the details carefully. Sorry for that.
>> >
>> > I think the major difference is the "local" vs "global" part. I do think
>> > having the ability to give changesets private labels locally can be useful -
>> > that's probably another extension other than "topic".
>> 
>> I would definitely agree it is something else besides "topics". It might
>> not appear so but I would definitely be interested in your ideas for
>> this because I think it would help use provide something like "pull
>> request refs" on Bitbucket for Mercurial.
>
> I mistakenly thought "topic" was "private lightweight named branch". But
> it isn't. Since there are 3 concepts already, I don't think it is worth to
> invest on a fourth thing which will further clutter the interface and
> confuse people, although it might be useful in some cases.

That is a fair and good point.

> Part of the motivation to find a bookmark replacement (at fb) is things like
> local bookmarks pointing to public changesets can confuse new users. The
> reason bookmarks are used is partially because some arcanist commands
> require an active bookmark. We may want to change those arcanist commands,
> and just let new users use hashes or "Dxxxx" aliases.
>
> In the future when creating a new working directory is cheap because of
> fuse, we may hide those concepts and use different filesystem paths to
> represent different features being worked on.

Fair enough. I'll take another pass at thinking about this tomorrow now
that I understand where you're coming from.


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