On Mercurial API

[Emanuele Aina]

Sébastien Pierre lamentò:

>>>> At then end of the day, looking at Git stable,
>>>> flexible and well-documented command line interface makes it more
>>>> appealing than Mercurial in the perspective of writing extensions.
>>> Git is stable Mercurial isn't.
>> Do you mean you've actually written extensions in git and mercurial
>> and found the process to be easier with git? If so, some comments on
>> the issues you encountered could be productive.
>>
>> Or is this a purely theoretical argument?
> 
> I have only written extensions and tools for/around Mercurial, and am  
> planning to try to port some to Git, so maybe I can contribute back  
> some impressions about that.
> 
> Generally, it was interesting for me to consider that a flexible well- 
> documented command line API could be easier to use than an a partial  
> unstable Python API... but I still have to try Git to see if this  
> consideration holds true ;)

Mercurial command line interface seems quite stable to me, at least as
stable as the GIT one. The performance should be similar, with GIT being
a little bit faster as it doesn't need the slow python interpreter startup.

I concur with you that using the python API would be preferable, but
Matt is right saying that is too early to offer API stability guarantees.

Maybe we could say that in the 1.x series the 'commands' module will
stay API compatible, so one could get a stable interface without
starting the python interpreter for each command.

-- 
Buongiorno.
Complimenti per l'ottima scelta.