hg export import problem

[Alpár Jüttner]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 10:22 -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:

> Import does one commit per input file and you can't exactly preserve 3
> commit ids in one commit.

That's sad.

My basic problem is the following.
We have a trac based ticketing system where people can discuss bugs and
enhancements  and can also upload patches. Sometimes an enhancement
consists of several changesets. For doing that basically there are two
options, bundle and export.
      * The bundle file is quite compact but there are two problems with
        it.
              * It is binary, so its content cannot be seen directly, in
                must be downloaded first in order to evaluate it.
              * Which is even worse: in order to look into a bundle
                file, you need a version of the repository containing
                all the parents of the bundle, but none of the changes
                in the bundle file. This kind of repo cannot be created
                once the changesets got into the main branch. A couple
                of days ago, John Mulligan posted a nice extension for
                listing the changesets in a bundle without a base repo,
                but its usage is still quite troublesome compared to
                just looking into a patch file, and this extension
                doesn't seem to be a standard part of mercurial in the
                near future.
      * The other option would be using export/imports but they do not
        support multiple changesets.

Thus, I would probably like to see some kind of text based bundle
format.

Do you have any suggestion? How do the competitors (git, bzr) handle
this?

Best regards,
Alpar