Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/13] remote-hg: general updates

From: Jed Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:11:38 -0500

Felipe Contreras <[email-masked]> writes:

> I still don't see any good reason why a user might prefer gitifyhg,
> even more importantly, why gitifyhg developers don't contribute to
> remote-hg.

Felipe, I read your blog announcement [1] and got the impression that
remote-hg was ready for daily use.  When I tried to use it, it promptly
crashed in my first attempt to clone.  I opened up the script, fixed
whatever caused the first stack trace and made it slighly further before
it crashed again.  I couldn't tell what was expected to work, what was a
known problem, and what was an unknown problem.  Many things clearly did
not work and it had the look of a project that was not getting active
use.  I felt that it was wildly oversold and that putting it into
git.git was premature.

I tried gitifyhg later and it basically worked out of the box.  All
known problems were marked by 'xfail' test cases.  At that time,
remote-hg failed almost all the gitifyhg tests.  I contributed a few
things to gitifyhg, including the notes support (essential when talking
via email with other people using Mercurial).  Since then, the last
major project I'm involved with has switched to Git so I rarely need
gitifyhg or remote-hg any more.

FWIW, I also thought Dusty's original announcement oversold gitifyhg, but
it was closer to the truth and upon cloning the repo, it was more clear
what didn't work.  The early history of gitifyhg is quite chaotic and I
didn't realize at first how much code turned out to be borrowed from
remote-hg.  I don't know whether you wrote all of remote-hg or borrowed
significant parts from elsewhere.  To be honest, I don't really care,
but it would be good to coalesce around one project that is well-tested
and has documented behavior so that the poor folks stuck with Mercurial
upstreams can have dependable behavior.

[1] http://felipec.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/git-remote-hg-bzr-2/