2.9 Sprint Notes

Notes from the 2.9 development sprint. For planning, see 2.9sprint.

1. GSoC

• Flow control was a problem.
• "Patch 1 has to happen as soon as possible" - mpm

• We need a wiki page on how GSoC should go - TheMystic, mpm, smf?

2. Flow control

• Flow control issues we had with GSoC apply to the project in general. It's hard to keep track of updated series.
• Automate closing of patches/bugs that have had no activity for a long period of time - mpm
• We should prototype a replacement for Patchwork.
  • Patches in Patchwork are usually out of date and require cleanup.
  • Hard to identify patch series threads.
  • A mail bot that runs check-code, etc. would be nice.
• Clean up/clarify Bugzilla workflow. - mpm
• Ping people that submitted a bug when a pre-lease is put out - marmoute

3. Big repos

• Facebook rewrote inotify using watchman (to speed up hg status) called hgwatchman

• Narrow clone would be helpful
• Should we change the manifest format?

4. Revsets

• Make them generative. - mpm
• Replace log code "monstrosity" with the graph log code (this is "98% done").
• Revset shorthand to find all changesets on a branch (including all heads) excluding changesets common to another branch.

5. Templater

• String escaping woes. - mpm, smf, durin42
• Expose working directory, active bookmark, etc.
• Global templates, templates for commands other than hg log. - mpm
• Color extension doesn't integrate well with the templater? - marmoute

6. Linkrevs with filtering

• hg log filename/hg annotate doesn't play well with hidden revisions (which may have links to file revisions).
• Sudoku-like algorithm?

7. Advocacy

• More writeups by large users
• Training videos
• "hg tutor"?
• Marketing page with selling points
• We should clear up confusion around who to talk to when large projects are having issues with Mercurial. We should identify project liaisons.

• Git <-> Hg rosetta stone that's prettier and more prominent than GitConcepts - mjturk, durin42, TheMystic

  • Grep "Pro Git" for important things to include

• ScaleMercurial wiki page

• Might want to "market" these efforts on Hacker News, reddit, etc?
• Promote the online "learn hg" sites that port the "learn git" ones to use hg

8. Usability

• Enable more extensions by default

• Allow some form of streamlined config editing - TheMystic

• Proper shelve/stash solution
• Better "hg log"

9. bundle2

• "This is a blocker for lots of interesting things, and we need to put a lot of effort into it." - mpm

10. Python compatilibity

• durin42 is working on getting "hg help" to run under Python 3. This requires fixing some import cycles (which currently work under Python 2 due to usage of relative imports).

11. Infrastructure

• ProjectInfrastructure - We need to document who admins/has access to what.

• We may need to rewrite wiki spam countermeasures in the future.

12. Packaging

• Include all platform-specific build scripts in main Mercurial repository.
• Automate builds (instead of relying on various contributors).

13. Deprecation

• Deprecate: hg parents, children extension, graphlog, inotify, transplant, win32text
• Nuke: interhg
• Contrib: old templates

14. Shelve

• We should make that better, or something.

15. Manifest compression

• More compression gains to be made.

16. Clone cache

• kiilerix, durin42 have different solutions. (Someone fill this in with more detail, please!)

17. Scalability

• Add Scalability page to wiki
• Reduce open/close revlog calls.
• Delta caching.
• Pushing unauthenticated ends up doing two full pushes.
• Repos with many heads can send more header data than nginx can handle by default.

18. Patch meta

• With more patch metadata, we can make hg import --exact more exact.
• Add more metadata to patches:
  • obsolescence markers,
  • things in the "extra" field
    • We'd need special handling for unprintable keys/values (e.g., transplant).

19. Bookmarks

• "@" keeps getting messed up on the Hg repo--probably due to a bug (or bisect)
• "@" is confusing
• Warn when deactivating a bookmark (and perhaps give the command to go back to that bookmark)
• Show active bookmark more aggressively
• Warn on pull when a remote bookmark has changed

20. Obsolete markers

See also 2.9sprintObsoleteNotes

21. Resolve State

• Keep a line for each prompt so that a user can redo a prompt
• Hide second (weird) parent from summary
• 'other' and 'local' are non-intuitive
  • Rebase switches these
  • Could take the first line of the commit message
  • Could use bookmark, branch, etc.

22. Copied files

• Better algorithm from mpm can extend addremove and run fast