New ideas and suggestions

1. Web application to manage users and repos using hgwebdir and ssh authentication

It would be very useful having an app that would:

2. Add stats support to hgweb and hgwebdir

Hg web servers could add a page providing some useful stats for the existing repos like what [http://statcvs.sourceforge.net/statcvs-stats/ StatCVS] does.

3. Application to create, validate and initialize configuration files

It would be very useful having an app that would:

It could have:

It should at least have a text interface (a simple one to do the first time configuration, as asking for username, email, editor...)

4. Greater flexibility for merge/export

Experience from several other systems suggests that the current approach to handling BinaryFiles is not adequate. mpm is absolutely right that the notion of a binary file is intrinsically confused. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that we can avoid it. This needs some discussion, so I'm attempting to add a page for that: NewIdeas/FileTypes

5. User friendly off-line synch of distributed repos using "Bundle Digest"

see [http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue392]

6. Combine the advantages of named branches and clone branches

Named branches ("hg branch" command) have the following advantages:

Clones have the following advantage:

The ideal solution would unify clones and named branches and combine the advantages of both systems.

One possibility (but probably not very good) would be to have a shared top-level folder that stores all changesets of the reference repo. This top-level folder then contains subfolders for each checked-out branch and these subfolders only store the additional changesets for the top-level folder and the actual source files of the checked-out revision. For example:

7. Provide a simple function/tool for creating changelogs

It would be nice to have a tool that assists you in changelog creation. SVN can export the history as XML and svn2cl can convert that into a nice-looking changelog. We should have something similar (maybe without the extra XML conversion step).

You can use hg log --style=changelog for this, and XML is not the solution to everything. -- ThomasArendsenHein DateTime(2006-12-07T09:43:51Z)

8. Provide an extension to push/pull and view remote repos using just rsync/ftp

I would allow to publish repos without the need to have python or hg installed on the server. Even for a read-only use it could be nice to have.

Also, it would be really wonderful being able to view the remote repo even if that involves pulling the remote repo using the rsync/ftp extension and locally launching the smart server to view it on a browser.

With these, publishing a repo could be just a matter of copying a dir, which is a good win for people that don't have too much control over the servers they use (yes, there are servers without python 2.3 on them and where you don't have shell access and are still useful to share that info).

This extension, along with mail bundles to send patches to maintainers would make a cheap and dirty way to have a DVCS platform.

9. Extend push/pull to include progressbar

This would make me very happy. I use hg to manage my personal photo collection (several gigs) and transfers take really long. Some progress indication would be nice...

It doesn't have to be a percentage gauge, only a "sending diff for file 456 of 78678" would be fine, too...

10. Suggestions for handling commit text

I already have an idea for the changes for the second item. If my limited understanding of Python is correct, it would simply be necessary to add a call to the hook as: {{{newtext = self.hook("committextverify", text, parent1=xp1, parent2=xp2); if newtext is None:

text = newtext; }}}