Mercurial named branches vs multiple repositories for linux

Mercurial is just not as flexible, even with all the plugins like histedit, shelf and rebase. Differences similarities git versus mercurial comparison chart. Or is there a better way of keeping git and mercurial server in. Using mercurial hg nasa infrared telescope facility. Mercurial generalizes this by letting each changeset have multiple children. Mercurial grew the ability to do gitstyle branching later, but git had it from the. That is, the branch name is stored in the changeset. With named branches the branch name is embedded in each changeset. Git branches are allpurpose, allterrain, and mercurial have different tools for different purposes, and can almost do as much as git branches, but not quite. As such, git is not so much a version control system as it is a tool for building your own versioncontrolled workflow.

It was my understanding that all branches were pushedpulled automatically. Nov 20, 2014 the git distributed revision control system is a sweet step up from subversion, cvs, mercurial, and all those others weve tried and made do with. Now, ive explained before why i think the only real difference between git and mercurial is how they handle branches. It is designed for coordinating work among programmers, but it can be used to track changes in any set of files. Gits command line is also better, it gives the user hints, mercurials does not. Aug 07, 2008 as such, git is not so much a version control system as it is a tool for building your own versioncontrolled workflow. The assumption is that youre using linux, os x, or similar. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, nonlinear workflows. Git was created by linus torvalds in 2005 for development of the. So, here is a comparison between git and mercurial. As an example, if you intend to have a branch with notforrelease changes in it. Use the command hg update to switch to an existing branch.

We maintain a branch called stable in addition to the default branch and make our releases based on the stable branch. They are a part of the main repository, so they are available to everyone involved. There are a bewildering number of different ways you can work with mercurial. Mercurial for git users and vice versa nikolaus raths. The linux kernel project decided to use git rather than mercurial, but mercurial is now used by many other projects. Mercurial has px which spans across branches, how useless. Mercurial probably has the best default tool available for converting from other repository types conversion to convert git repository to mercurial first enable the hg converttool by adding the plugin definition to your.

Every cloned repositories contain a working directory and a store of complete projects. Cloning a repository is how you branch in darcs and is a really simple concept. The subdirectory feature is one the mercurial team cares about, but its not trivial to do either, which is why it hasnt been done yet. As a result, you tend to find a lot more separate mercurial repositories than single repos with bookmarks, and a lot more named branches with hardtoeliminate commits as well since even closing a branch doesnt really get rid of it. There once was a biz called bitbucket, that told mercurial. Mercurial clearly has more traction than git in the python world and python itself is switching to it rather than git, but git has a bigger general mindshare. We maintain a branch called stable in addition to the default branch and make our releases based on. The first merge of multiple branches was done on april 18. When you want to do something different, you just clone your repo somewhere else and start working. For mercurial, this is the fundamental representation of the repository. An explanation of using named branches in projects with tortoisehg.

Let us do that without dumb warnings that make named branches sound like a bad idea. Inspired by a successful git branching model we are about to move away from our push daily work into master repo and fork off release branches at regular intervals workflow into work on separate feature branches and merge finished features back into master. Converting repositories from git to mercurial example. There are times when you want the branch name associated with a commit to be just as permanent as the commit is. At the same time, changes committed on a certain branch dont get mixed with the changes in the default branch, so features are kept separate, until they get merged into the default branch. This means that clones are great for quick experiments where you dont want to record a branch name, and named branches are good for long term branches 1. I know the mercurial internals though, and its definitely doable, just a lot of work. Mercurial grew the ability to do gitstyle branching later, but git had it from the beginning. You can follow our simple guide to learn how to revision your documents with mercurial, or just use the quick start to get going instantly. If your local changes drive to multiple heads with same branch name, you must. An indepth analysis of mercurial and git branches felipe. Multiple anonymous heads which are useless anyway are not supported.

Ive studied cryptography at university of aarhus in denmark. Does anyone know of any long term serious effects of having a git and a mercurial repo in the same directory. The real eye opener was working on multiple different workflow styles using git. Version control systems without a distributed architecture include subversion and cvs. How to back up local mercurial repositories and use rebase. Speaking as someone who used both git and mercurial, and who has used both to contribute to projects. Branch names are often used to distinguish different lines of. New github accounts come with a prefab repo populated by a readme file, license, and buttons for quickly creating bug reports, pull requests, wikis, and other useful features. Also, the root question isnt really about whether to use named branches vs branch repos, but rather how one uses branch repositories when also using subrepositories. For more information, steve loshs guide is a good resource explaining branching in the two systems.

No longer available to linux kernel developers starting in 2005. The concept of named branches exists only in mercurial, and does not have an equivalent in git. You say with mercurial we hope to be able to keep committing locally, and rebase every so often, thus gaining independence while staying free of the administration costs of bcreating named branches. The major functional difference is in the way git and mercurial name branches within repositories. Some extensions add new commands that you can use from the command line, while others work behind the scenes, for example adding capabilities to mercurials builtin server mode. Mercurial is also a tad more simple, but git is more powerfull for more complex repository management e. The concept of named branches exists only in mercurial, and does not have an.

Daves visual guide to tortoisehg and mercurials named branches. The branches are divergent since about onetwo years. First, i highly recommend a guide to branching in mercurial. If cclosed is specified, also list branches which have been marked closed see hg commit closebranch. Daves visual guide to tortoisehg and mercurials named. Mercurial makes this easy for you by providing named branches. Technically, a bookmark and a branch are both the same thing as a tag though living in different namespaces, but the expected usage is different. Mercurial branches and bookmarks have some limitations of git branches. Mercurial branches now, ive explained before why i think the only real difference between git and mercurial is how they handle branches. Mercurial for git users and vice versa nikolaus raths website. The key to working this way is that mercurial lets you assign a persistent name to a branch. With a named branch, you can work on the experimental feature and the main branch of the project at the same time and in the same directory. So my question then, if we should adopt to a more flexible workflow using feature branches, we must have a solid branchmerge workflow that does not cause havoc in the master branch. While mercurial works with multiple small picture branches in a repository all the time for example after you pull changes in, but before you merge them, it can also work with multiple big picture branches.

I became involved in the mercurial project in 2008. You can create branches on git and mercurial repositories. Mercurial provides a flexible extension mechanism that lets people extend its functionality, while keeping the core of mercurial small and easy to deal with. There once was a biz called bitbucket, that told mercurial to. Can i move the directory a local mercurial repository is contained in without breaking it, or does it know where it lives and expect it to live there forever. I would like to begin testing fogbugz and kiln from fog creek which uses mercurial. The purpose of this document is to provide a simple guide to the immediate use cases for hg. When you add changes to a new branch in mercurial and push to another repository, the branch name is pushed at the same time. Mercurial itself was developed using two clones for years before we switched to using named branches. Git branches are allpurpose, allterrain, and mercurial have different tools for different purposes, and can. Gits branches introduce too much fragility in the system for end user consumption because branches are responsible for both naming and keeping commits alive and do not allow you to describe sets of commits nor is there an alternative feature for that, mercurials branches are too permanent in that they cannot even be renamed well, theres. If i work alone and make commits ill make by making three commits. I dont want to pull the changes for multiple reasons. I mostly work with python, but also like functional languages like haskell a lot.

In git, a branch is a pointer to a node of the dag with a userdefined name. Linux kernel, android, clutter, compiz fusion, drupal, fedora. And maybe you could decide to allow only a head per branch. The website is a project of the mercurial community. Comparsion of mercurials and gits branching systems and why one of them. Watch a video on a git or mercurial subversion repository here. The creation of a branch can also happen in two different repositories r1 and r2, both. Mercurial has become one of the holy wars of hacker culture. The scope of control is definable from the repository level down to the. But now im on a linux desktop and i use mercurial at the command line.

Right now, if we need to work independently, we have two options. The project was announced on april 6, and became selfhosting as of april 7. Watch a video on a git or mercurialsubversion repository here. Its great for distributed development, when you have multiple contributors working on the same project, and it is excellent for safely trying out all kinds of crazy changes. Mercurial has no native suppport for rebase but support branches. In mercurial there are two types of branches you might see as a user. For interactive use, the web interface lets you browse a single repository or a. The only other argument people may have against mercurial s named branches is the possibility of name collisions.

Every dag node in mercurial belongs to exactly one named branch which may be the default branch, in which case it is often not displayed explicitly. For more information and instructions, see hg help git list of commands. Figure 1 shows my github testbed, named playground. I have two repositories with tho different mercurual named branches, say v1 and v2. Rockstarprogrammer the differences between mercurial and git. With mercurial, branch names are cloned and pulled along with their changesets. Ultimately theyre both pretty good the git cli is still shit though, as far as im concerned, but it also packs more punch out of the box versus the mercurial plugins you have to. Each repository has a 2 gb size limit, but we recommend keeping your repository no larger than 1 gb.

The term branch is sometimes used for slightly different concepts. This setup best fits the linux kernel commit model of single puller. Converting mercurial repositories to git on windows. This issue is often encountered when configuring hooks or extensions for shared repositories or servers. Where i work, we have a default project with multiple branches. Linux kernel, android, clutter, compiz fusion, drupal. I would like to for at a least a short while continue development using both solutions. By default hg push will simply compare the repositories and see that x, y, and. And the named branches feature remains useful, so long as you dont. A light branching strategy with mercurial and bookmarks.

In an answer on the mercurial mailing list, matt mackall explained how the name mercurial was chosen. Probably because the history of the project was not the bigass linux. Much time has been wasted by people trying to use mercurial s named branches like gits branches. Gits concept of branches as simple names for commits, and the ability to switch branches really easily within one checkout rather than encouraging the use of multiple working directories helped hugely.

Git and mercurial branching armin ronachers thoughts and writings. Apr 30, 2015 gits branches introduce too much fragility in the system for end user consumption because branches are responsible for both naming and keeping commits alive and do not allow you to describe sets of commits nor is there an alternative feature for that, mercurial s branches are too permanent in that they cannot even be renamed well, theres. For example, when faced with the fact that no git tool performs the equivalent of hg addremove a useful mercurial command that adds all untracked files and removes all missing files i found one line to a script originally written by james robey. Using mercurial hg this document is a slighly more readerfriendly version of the notes i took while learning to use mercurial.

Named branches vs multiple repositories stack overflow. Mercurial branch repositories with subrepos stack overflow. See hg help glossary for more information about named branches and. Git branches map to hg bookmarks, tags just work, merging and branching and multiple heads just work, etc, etc. Converting mercurial repositories to git on windows helge klein. Mercurial supports a multitude of workflows and you can easily enhance its functionality with extensions. Dealing with multiple named branches in a repository. With mercurial we hope to be able to keep committing locally, and rebase every so often, thus gaining independence while staying free of the administration costs of bcreating named branches. Id like to graft some changesets from one repo into the other, without pulling the changes.

Having a git repo and mercurial in the same directory. It is also the newest changeset in the repository called tip. A short overview of mercurials decentralized model is also available. A short overview of mercurial s decentralized model is also available. Its based on simple principles, but its almost magical to watch. Which is why mercurial does it automatically using namedbranches, its essential free. In mercurial, you can do this as it allows multiple heads. The linux kernel project decided to use git rather than mercurial, but mercurial is now used by many other projects see below. The second best option, though i consider it really ugly, is the named branches idea you mentioned.

Bitbucket displays the create a new repository page. The quickest way to get some good handson git practice is by opening a free github account. Git branches always have a name, but mercurial has the concept of a branch and a named branch. Create a mercurial repository atlassian documentation. A code project can consist of multiple repositories across multiple accounts but can also be a single repository from a single account. After using mercurial daily for over a year, we are about to find a better workflow for our dvcs. In mercurial, every changeset belongs to a named branch. Named branches didnt really come into the picture here because they are quite optional. Note also that a single repository can easily accommodate multiple lightweight branches in mercurial. With the exception of the repository type, everything you enter on this page you can later change. See the standard branching 2 page in the wiki for a description of the recommended workflow.