Suffering from CVS mindset

[Yawar Amin]

On 4/11/10 4:37 PM, Greg Ward said:
> [...]
> One of the Big Ideas in Subversion is that branches are nothing
> special: they're just cheap copies of <dir1> to <dir2>.  The whole
> /{trunk,tags,branches} layout is just the conventional way to
> implement that.
>
> It turns out, of course, that that is a *bad* idea.  Branches *are*
> special; they're not the same as directories.  And tags are also
> special and different.  And that's what's wrong with Subversion
> (IMHO).
>   

IMHO Mercurial's named branches are adequate, as in they simulate the
ideal (to me) branching mechanism: a branch is simply a named pointer to
a head. I find that if I use the named pointer mental model while I'm
dealing with Hg branches, I don't have any trouble. The graphlog
extension helps a lot too.

> [...]
> The OP is clearly trying to wrap his head around the core concepts of
> Mercurial.  Throwing named branches into the mix is not going to help
> him.  And suggesting a weird and unconventional use of named branches
> is even less helpful.  Threads like this are not about thinking up
> clever and original ways to use Mercurial, but about trying to explain
> the normal and conventional ways better.
>   

OK. Sure. A new user coming in probably wants to use Hg in a simple way
to start off with, then use some of its more specialised features. But
just on the off chance that the user has special needs to start off with
(whether right or wrong), I don't see anything wrong with pointing out
that yes, Hg can accommodate them right off the bat--they don't have to
shift their work habits and worldview immediately.

In any case, I do hope the OP decides to keep it simple.


Cheers,

 Yawar

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