Re: How to use Mercurial

Hi all,

Pat's approach is certainly one way to handle this problem (the other learning the relatively obscure 'hg heads' and 'hg merge' operations).  However, my real concern here is that the use of mercurial places an unnecessary burden on editors while actually interfering with the process.

Mercurial's (sole) purpose is to allow multiple developers to create individual *working* copies of a software code base.  Mercurial was never intended for use as a document editing environment.  Our problems often occur when I wish to make a change to Concepts and find that Pat has edited Semantics (or vice versa).  Mercurial insists that my copy of Semantics be updated before I can push Concepts.  That makes sense for software, but is simply counterproductive for documents.

I have been asked in the past why I dislike Mercurial for document editing.  Hopefully this helps explain it.  In the future, I encourage the keepers of W3C infrastructure (now copied) to consider a *simpler* approach.

Git has been suggested.  I disagree, although I like git for software.  Why?  Just perform an 'hg heads' in the current Mercurial tree and you will see the problem; there are many dangling heads and I'll bet big bucks that none of them are intentional.  That suggests that we have lost edits due to the cognitive load of the tool.  That's bad.  Git would have the same problem.  Encouraging easy and simple branching is handy for software experimentation but bad (really very bad) for creating specifications.

Regards,
Dave
--
http://about.me/david_wood



On May 10, 2013, at 01:28, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:

> To update an edit, 
> 
> (1) completely trash all your current repositories. They are already broken.
> (2) create an entirely new repository from scratch
> (3) cut and paste your new file into the folder where it is supposed to go, trashing the older file that was there.
> (4) Change the file name to "index"
> (5) commit
> (6) push.
> 
> Obvious, right?  Soooo much easier than, like, using FTP or email.
> 
> Pat
> 
> 
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