Simon's Musings

March 14, 2008

Mercurial

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 9:56 am
Tags: , ,

I’ve been experimenting with Mercurial, as a means of streamlining the way I work with the OpenAFSĀ  CVS repository. In particular, I’m trying to improve the management of my disconnected operation code, as well as better controlling the large number of patches I’m producing as part of the prototyping and error removal exercise.

Because I tend to flit backwards and forwards between different pieces of code, I tend to find that with CVS I have a large number of different checked out sandboxes. For big projects, such as the disconnection work, there’s no history, or ability to revert changes without taking a snapshot of the sandbox, which is both time consuming and inefficient. For smaller projects, there’s either a huge number of different sandboxes (and the related ‘where did I do X?’ problem), or lots of code ends up being intermingled within the same sandbox, and lots of things have to be unpicked before patches can be sent upstream.

These actually end up being two different problems, and it looks like there are two different mercurial workflows that are best suited to handle them. For disconnection, what I really need is a way of tracking, and managing, my code changes, and I’m using mercurial as a normal SCM to achieve this. With the prototyping changes, what I really need are patch queues – I have a large number of changes which I’m trying to arrange into manageable chunks in order to send upstream. Depending on my testing schedule, I may have a large number of patches awaiting submission. In this case, mercurial’s patch queues seem like by far and a way the best fit.

I’m intending on making my mercurial repositories for both of these tasks publicly available. For now, I can offer a mercurial import of the OpenAFS ‘upstream’ CVS at http://lochranza.inf.ed.ac.uk/upstream/ Other repositories are likely to appear there over time.

Local users may be interested to note that they can get mercurial on a DICE machine by including dice/options/mercurial.h in their profile.

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