1.0 approaches

[Georg]

2008/2/8, Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>:
>
> On Thursday, 07 February 2008 at 18:49, Matt Mackall wrote:
> > There are still some areas with rough edges - named branches and case
> > sensitivity come to mind. Improvements there that aren't too invasive
> > will be considered, but these aren't currently going to be considered
> > showstoppers.
>
> In my opinion, named branches in their current form do more harm than
> good.
> People use them expecting them to behave more like in-repository clones
> that they can play with and then drop, and usually become frustrated
> with them, but only after they've permanently cluttered their
> repositories.
>
> They also interact badly with clone and older clients, as well as having
> more benign UI warts.
>
> I'd be inclined to discourage their use strongly in 1.0 (maybe relegating
> them to debugcommands) unless they are improved. I think they will tend to
> result in bad feelings, whereas most of the rest of mercurial is warm
> and fuzzy.


I believe you are blurring things.

It is true that you cannot easily drop things that you played with.  I once
triggered a long thread on that.  I was proposing to add metadata to
branches (branches in the sense of a part of the version tree, not
necessarily a named branch) so they can be marked as "obsolete" and maybe
garbage collected. The thread was not conclusive because throwing away stuff
in a distributed repository is not easily possible, and mabe not desirable.

But this all holds for simple forks of the tree in the same way as for named
branches. You just cannot remove.

Don't blame the branch feature for that.  The branch feature only allows you
to add a descriptive name to your experimental forks.  And that's a very
good thing.  It can, e.g., be used to color a visible branch in a graph
viewer :)
(Steve I still have that in my plan, contributing a patch for branch
coloring in hgtk)

--
Regards,
Georg.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/attachments/20080208/44933dee/attachment.htm