hg diff in the presence of subrepositories

[Martin Geisler]

paul_nathan at selinc.com writes:

Hi Paul

> I am working to deploy Mercurial in my company using subrepositories
> to manage our modules, and I am providing support for developers.
>
> Our repositories are structured along the lines recommended by mpm[1].
>
> toplevel/
>     ./module
>     ./module
>     ./productcode
>     ./otherproductcode

Sounds good.

> [...] And the conversation continues as I explain the operation of the
> .hgsubstate file and how it records the state of the subrepos, but
> only on commit.

So I take it that you would also find it natural if Mercurial would
update the .hgsubstate file *on disk* when it notices that it is out of
date with regard to a subrepository?

Right now the .hgsubstate file is written to disk in the middle of the
top-level commit and the current content is actually ignored. It would
make a lot of things more natural if the .hgsubstate file was really
modified on disk: both 'hg status' and 'hg diff' would suddenly work out
of the box with subrepos and you could clearly see what the old and the
new subrepo revisions are.

> The problem is:
>
> Notice that there is an inconsistency of operation here: hg diff is
> not telling the user that there really is a difference in the world of
> the top repository. Nor is hg status. Yet, the connotation and
> denotation of the words say that they tell you the status and the
> difference. But they return that there is _no_ difference.
>
> While this may make sense from an implementation standpoint (and it
> does, if I think like an implementer), I have received this question
> from multiple people who are experienced, skilled and qualified
> software engineers who have used other version control systems
> (ClearCase, SVN, git).
>
> From my perspective as a support person for hg in my company, this is
> essentially a bug in the user experience and user interface.

I agree with you here, the subrepo UI is still buggy. I've worked with a
client to improve this (we got the --subrepos flags added to a number of
commands) but it is still not perfect.

The "invisible" .hgsubstate file and the resulting inconsistency between
status/diff and commit is probably the biggest remaining problem for my
client. We'll probably work on a getting a temporary ui setting into
Mercurial that will make things consistent, but that is still under
discussion.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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