Forest? Branches? And other beginner questions...

Marcin Kasperski Marcin.Kasperski at softax.com.pl
Sat Mar 17 12:32:43 CDT 2007


(This is my first post to this list, so, before actual question, I would 
like to thank the creators of mercurial. Interesting, well implemented 
tool. Thank you.)

(background)
I am new to mercurial (= I've read significant part of docs, and make 
some experiments), and to the distributed source management (= have been 
using RCS, DEC CMS, CVS and Subversion for years). Recently I decided to 
adapt some distributed version control tool, read a couple of pages, 
narrowed list to git and mercurial and finally picked the latter as I 
need windows support.

(question 1)
 From the docs I've read I got the feeling, that I should use 'many 
repositories' (= create separate mercury directory for every program, 
library, documentation, whatever I track) - so the tagged, pulled, 
pushed item is not made of a few independent entities. OK, let it be, 
but if I then imagine having those 10 or maybe 20 separate projects, 
tasks like verifying whether all are pushed to the main location, or 
getting all the things to the new machine start being tedious.
I noticed Forest plugin, which seem to be intended to help in such 
cases. Unfortunately, it is almost undocumented (I can mostly guess what 
the commands do, but some description of suggested process, layout etc 
would be really useful)

(question2)
In git it is fairly clear, that one developer on one machine is using 
one repo with many branches. In mercurial, it seemed each separate line 
should be separate clone. But recently some branches command showed up, 
not documented (almost). What is the current 'way of doing things'?




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