Mozilla: hg as a collaboration tool

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Feb 7, 2008 2:07 AM, Dustin Sallings <dustin at spy.net> wrote:
>  Personally, I find mercurial far more simple to use than CVS in all but the
> single-user, single-machine cases.  I don't, however, pretend like I'm using
> CVS when I'm using it.

I haven't used CVS, but I've used SVN a lot, and while I find
Mercurial much more satisfying to work with than SVN, I can see where
some people might get confused. For example, someone was asking about
doing the equivalent of svn update -r23425 file.txt. In Mercurial,
update only refers to repo-wide operations, and you have to use revert
instead. Similarly, I think CVS/SVN don't have a concept similar to
Mercurial's dirstate. I still don't exactly have a grasp of what it
entails, but it seems that in some cases, it helps to be aware that it
exists and that it might influence your operations. One other thing is
hg status showing files that don't show up in hg diff (because just
their x bit changed, for example). In these cases, it either helps to
understand the underlying model or there are simple fixes ([diff] git
= true or some such), but it may still confuse people who haven't
spent some time with hg to figure it out.

FWIW, I'm thinking a document on "Mercurial for Subversion users"
might help some people. Does something like that exist yet? I think
developers who have used CVS or SVN before may not be as interested in
larger-scale user guides, but could use a simple translation of common
commands with some comments about how and why they are different.

Cheers,

Dirkjan