Can't commit any changes?

[Haszlakiewicz, Eric]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: mercurial-bounces at selenic.com [mailto:mercurial-bounces at selenic.com]
>
>Gosh, Mike, thanks for taking the time to write.  I had already found
>that page but clearly my definition of "simple" isn't at all matching
>the Mercurial concept.  In the "quick start" I saw that you clone via
>http...didn't realize that didn't allow for the full circle to happen.
>
>Really, I need a simple step by step walk-through (if there is such a
>thing) for setting up a repository that people can write and read to.
>I'm not sure why it matters whether it's /usr/var/www/html or
>/some/other/directory.  Users are hoping to use a Mac client called Hg
>(a gui) to do most of the work.
>
>How exactly does one return a cloned repo back to the pool so others
>can find it, access it, and make new changes?

pool?  There is no "pool".  A cloned repo is just a directory sitting on your local machine.

>In our case, our developers want to be able to quickly and immediately
>see how the changes look on the web, hence the need to publish to the
>/var/www/html directory.
>
>Is there a syntax so that instead of "publishing by http" they can
>publish some other fashion?  Does Mercurial usually require people be
>on the same local machine?  If so, it seems kind of impractical.
>
>Again, thank you for the help.  I guess coming from a mindset of FTP
>or so on, I feel like it should be a relatively easy thing to use
>Mercurial over a intranet or the internet.  I need people to be able
>to be home and still able to clone, make changes, and return their
>files back to the pool.
>
>Am I just barking up the wrong tree entirely?  Is this what Mercurial
>does?  Or should I investigate other version control options?  Or just
>tell people they need the command line and they have to ssh directly
>into the /var/www/html directory to do any work?

It sounds to me like you're confusing a version control tool with a 
deployment tool.  Mercurial isn't meant to be used to deploy your changes to 
a web server.  For that you probably want to keep using FTP, or whatever 
you're already using.

When you push changes to a central mercurial repository, you're actually 
synchronizing the internal state of the repository that describes the entire 
history of changes.  A push does not actually update the files that you work 
with directly.  On the server, the only thing you'll see in the repository 
is a .hg directory.

Perhaps you're getting confused because Mercurial happens to perform this 
synchronization over http, but that is not related to whether the files you 
are editing with happen to be a web page.

If you want to have pushed changes automatically show up as a website in the
same server you might be able to do that with a hook on the server.  For 
that, you'll need a location for the repository, which is treated by the web 
server as a mercurial repository (due to a line like 
ScriptAliasMatch ^/hg(.*) /httpd/cgi/hgwebdir.cgi$1
in your apache config), and a *separate* location with clone of the main 
repository that you run "hg update" on (through the hook) to cause all the 
files to show up.

eric