[isabelle-dev] Mercurial conversion relaunch

[Lawrence Paulson]

Changing revision control systems would be a major upheaval, so I hope  
it will bring clear benefits. First, as a very obvious point, I assume  
that there is a way of importing the entire revision history (not just  
the current snapshot) into the new system. It would not be acceptable  
if we had to use two different systems depending on the age of the  
revision that we are interested in looking at.

My particular concern would be the state of user interface support for  
Mercurial. I gather that I am not the only RSI sufferer among the  
developers. One advantage of CVS is that it is well integrated with  
editors. I use BBEdit and I can for example revert to an old version  
of a file, display the differences between it and other versions  
(earlier and later), and carry across differences that I wish to  
preserve, all without touching the keyboard. So I would like to know  
whether there is a way of doing such things in Mercurial without  
resorting to the command line.

Larry

On 3 Sep 2008, at 20:20, Makarius wrote:

> Incremental repository conversion is not very stable.  Problems are  
> likely
> to occur again in this intermediate situation where the old CVS is  
> still
> in action.  Pretty soon we really need to step forward to using  
> Mercurial
> exclusively, or stay with CVS indefinitely.
>
> There are no technical problems to move on.  It is mainly a matter  
> of more
> people getting acquinted with the current state-of-the art in version
> control.  As pointed out before, Mercurial is actually easier to use  
> than
> old CVS/SVN, only the way of thinking needs to be updated a little.