[[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.

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