... and the others?

Posted Sep 22, 2005 18:35 UTC (Thu) by bos (guest, #6154)
In reply to: ... and the others? by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Mercurial: an alternative to git

Kevin, if you need features, just ask :-)

Missing features

Posted Sep 23, 2005 12:54 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, I have asked. I have been on the ArX, mercurial, and bazaar-ng lists for quite a while now. I was on the git/cogito list until it became clear to me that nobody was working on a user-friendly, command-line front end (such as cogito) that would be cross-platform.

One feature request for all systems is to have an eclipse plugin. As far as I know, only darcs has one, and it is still very preliminary.

I have requested that ArX get a simpler UI. The maintainer agrees that's a good idea, but it will take some serious reworking to achieve.

I have requested that mercurial support cheap branching on systems that don't have hardlinks. My three posts to the mercurial list asking about the feasibility of adding this feature have all, surprisingly, gone unanswered.

The bazaar2 folks have explained their plans to solve that cheap branching problem by adding "centralized storage". I believe they even have some prototypes working, but it looks like it's still a couple months away from being an official part of the product.

There is an experimental monotone add-on that supposedly allows you to serve a readonly repo on a cheap (http-only) web server. If that becomes mature, it might make monotone workable for me. Something similar could presumably be written for codeville.

Missing features

Posted Sep 23, 2005 16:28 UTC (Fri) by bos (guest, #6154) [Link]

We'd all love to have Eclipse plugins, I'm sure, but the unfortunate fact is that the current user communities of the various tools have not contributed any. Whether this is due to lack of interest, time, or experience I cannot say.

If you wanted to write one yourself, I am sure it would be very welcome.