Help. I've screwed up my repo again, and I have no idea how.

Mathieu Lacage Mathieu.Lacage at sophia.inria.fr
Fri Nov 3 06:42:05 CST 2006


On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 17:40 +0100, Thomas Arendsen Hein wrote:
> * Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net> [20061102 16:23]:
> > >>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de> writes:
> > 
> > Thomas> $ hg commit
> > Thomas> Abort: Please specify a username. (see 'hg help username')
> > 
> > I like it, but I think this may turn some people off from using
> > Mercurial (some users are already afraid of using versioning systems).
> > 
> > What could be done instead is *ask* the user to provide a username,
> > such as in
> > 
> > % hg commit
> > Please configure your full name and email address:
> > Full name [default: Samuel Tardieu]: <wait for user input>
> > Email address [default: sam at rfc1149.net]: <wait for user input>
> > 
> > and update ~/.hgrc appropriately.
> 
> What should happen if you already have a ~/.hgrc which just doesn't
> set username? How verbose has the message to be explaining what
> happens now that you put in personal data here?
> 
> I think it is important that Mercurial doesn't start to do things
> magically, this might annoy the experienced user and confuse the
> beginner.
> 
> Unlike e.g. codeville we don't have a command to store some
> variables like username. If we had, you could just say:
> $ hg commit
> Abort: No username set, please use something like:
>   hg setconfig ui.username="foo <bar at example.com>"
> 
> People using the commit feature of versioning systems should be able
> to use an editor I think. Or do I make wrong assumtions here?

You are right but this sort of thing is just really handy. For example,
darcs always records the equivalent of default-push in the repository
upon the first push if there is none. And this does save the user a bit
of effort. I consider myself a not-too-smart user and this sort of thing
just saves time. I don't think it hampers the predictability of
mercurial behavior either.

I think that a repository-specific hgrc file which can be automagically
edited by mercurial would be quite useful in that it would decrease the
barrier to start using mercurial.

Mathieu
-- 



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