On Mercurial API

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

* Sébastien Pierre <sebastien-lists at type-z.org> [20070730 17:00]:
> Just wanted to share a snippet from my Mercurial extensions with you:
> 
> 	# Mercurial 0.9.1
> 	if hasattr(mercurial.commands, 'find'):
> 		findcmd = mercurial.commands.find
> 	# Mercurial 0.9.3
> 	elif hasattr(mercurial.commands, 'findcmd'):
> 		findcmd = mercurial.commands.findcmd
> 	# Mercurial 0.9.4
> 	else:
> 		import mercurial.cmdutil
> 		findcmd = mercurial.cmdutil.findcmd
> 
> I think this kinds of sums up how I feel towards the current API.  
> It's difficult to use, it changes all the time, the code is the only  
> documentation, and in the end, it requires constant version-specific  
> patches like that.
> 
> Right now, the only viable solution for me is to use the command-line  
> as an interface, instead of the Python interface, but it comes with a  
> severe performance penalty.

contrib/hg-ssh uses:

from mercurial import commands
commands.dispatch(['-R', repo, 'serve', '--stdio'])

Which is basically just calling the command line, but without the
performance penalty. And this should work unchanged from Mercurial 0.6
until now.

A similar interface will exist in future versions, too, though it
might be not in the commands module.

> So I was wondering if you guys had some plans about an API redesign/ 
> update/consolidation ?

Currently some restructuring happens which causes the problems
you're seeing. The result should be that exatly this will be easier.

Thomas

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