Distributed Development with Mercurial

Every clone of a Mercurial repository can act as a consistent, fully functional repository itself. This is a very useful property of a DVCS; one that you can take advantage of to make development a lot easier, especially for teams that are dispersed in multiple places of the globe.

Imagine for a moment that your team is not sharing the same physical space every day. In fact, half of your team works in an office in the west coast of the United States and the other half is located somewhere in Europe.

Mercurial Clones without a Working Copy

Mercurial repository clones can have two parts:

1. An .hg/ subdirectory, where all the repository metadata is stored
2. A “working copy” area, where checked out files may live

The .hg/ subdirectory stores the repository metadata of the specific clone, including the history of all changesets stored in the specific clone, clone-specific hooks and scripts, information about local tags and bookmarks, and so on. This is the only part of a Mercurial repository that is actually mandatory for a functional repository.

FreeBSD doc-el picking up speed

As pleasures go, it is a strange yet somewhat refined one to see a project one has started pick up speed. My fellow translators at the Greek documentation team of FreeBSD have been busy lately, and the result of our collective work is a fairly large number of commits to the “doc-el” repository.

There are now at least four translators actively working on a chapter of their own: Manolis Kiagias, Vaggelis Typaldos, Kyriakos Kentrotis and me. Changesets flow between our repository clones almost every day, and I often find myself pulling patches from two or three places at the same time.

Dear Santa…

I know it’s a bit early for 2010, but can you please grant me a wish today and count it as one of the 2010 ones?

For 2010 (and the rest of 2009) I wish I can keep up today’s pace of reading code, hacking at it, running tests and then committing; and be able to do that almost every day:

$ hg  log --template '{date|isodate} {author|user}\n' | \
    fgrep 'keramida' | awk '{print $1,$4}' | sort | uniq -c | tail -2
  10 2009-06-01 keramida
  26 2009-06-04 keramida

Oh, and yeah… I’ll be a good boy ;-)

Mercurial crew branch grows diff -c option

With changeset 9c6ae2e09e11 the Mercurial “crew” branch includes support for a diff -c option now.

Gnus message scoring actually works

From the let-the-flames-roll-baby department:

Scripting Mercurial

Dan Fuchs posted a short article about scripting Mercurial to see what files an incoming changeset modifies.

I am always amazed at how easy Mercurial (and other free software tools) make this sort of thing.

Mercurial command demo: hg verify

One of the wonderful commands that Mercurial support is the “verify” command. Running this command in a Mercurial workspace goes through the backing store of the repository and makes sure that the history and contents of the versioned files are not corrupt, missing or otherwise in a “bad” state.

An example of how you can use this Mercurial command is described here.

doc-el gets commit email notifications

We have enabled commit email in the main freebsd/doc-el repository as of today :-)

A bunch of updates for the Greek FreeBSD/doc translations

Translations of technical documentation from English to Greek are a relatively difficult task. It takes a certain level of attention to detail and a fairly good command of both languages. Then there is the minor issue of keeping the translations up to date with their English counterparts.