Diff for "DanConnolly"

[http://www.advogato.org/person/connolly/ advogato diary], [http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ homepage at W3C].

/yes, I should send all this stuff to the MailingList... but I still feel I should do some more study before I oblige the mailing list subscribers to consider these issues./

Trying to test hg on an svn project; I tried these tailor.py commands:

source_repository  svn+ssh://dirk/home/connolly/webtechs-svn/
source_module bottles
source_kind svn
target_kind hg
logfile scm-convert-log
state_file scm-map
print_executed_commands 1
bootstrap 1
update

but tailor.py doesn't seem to use hg addremove, so it's not working: files don't seem to get added, and a lot of SVN revisions turn into noops.

Also thinking about hg and distributed version control in the context of [http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Diff RDF diff] and [http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PaperTrail.html paper trail].

The cryptographic history style of git and hg is cool in a lot of ways, but I wonder about this [http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2005-June/000710.html 23 Apr 2003 msg from Tom Lord]:

/However, in a distributed system -- whether that system is a distributed SCM or just a bunch of programmers trading trees and patches by hand -- it is simply not realistic to assume that the unbounded amount of history needed for your merge technique will be reliably available./

/You have, in effect, a tree of revisions. The loss of any one node partitions that tree into two trees of revisions and makes your style of merging between those two revision trees, thereafter, impossible./

/Loss of a network site? Disk crash and a bad back-up tape? Node has to be taken (or kept) off-line because some NDA-data slipped into it? End of the world./

It seems that CVS is more fractal in this way: I sometimes start with a local RCS repository and copy the ,v files into a CVS repostitory. I suppose hg handles that case, and better. But what about splitting a module out of a CVS repostory into its own repository, and preserving the history?

And what about checking out just part of a huge project? The entire W3C web site, going back to 1995, is one huge CVS repostory. I know the hg repository format is compact, but even so, I don't want to check out gigabytes worth of history just to edit the minutes of a meeting.

Also... shouldn't hgweb export the actual contents of the tip into HTTP space? Navigating the history is all well and good, but how about the actual state, without the pretty-printing etc. I think SVN does this.

• Ah... NewWebInterface seems to be what I want.