Re: [viewvc-users] Migration from CVS to Mercurial

C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> My understanding is that at least with Mercurial,
> there's already a Python interface to work with, which I would expect *has*
> to be of some help.  A simple, perhaps naive approach would need only to
> implement 10-15 interfaces, answering questions about item types and
> directory listings, revision log info, and so on.  But honestly, I have no
> estimate for how much work even that would be.
>   

I'm using ViewVC for a CVS deployment, but have myself moved to 
Mercurial a while ago. As a result, I've been using hgweb (the built-in 
Web interface for Mercurial) and I find it very usable, especially in 
more recent versions with the built-in graph support. For example (the 
CPython project):

http://hg.python.org/cpython/graph/7563f10275a2

Or, with some SVG-related customisations (which need a modern browser) 
showing a personal project:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/EventAggregator/graph

ViewVC and hgweb differ somewhat in style, probably because of the 
different structure of information you get in systems like Mercurial, 
with a more obvious focus on repository-wide changes in hgweb. I also 
think that hgweb benefits from usability experiences with systems like 
ViewVC, so that the number of links to follow to get to a piece of 
information can be reduced in various common cases. Disadvantages with 
hgweb include the fairly plain styling of diffs and the lack of syntax 
highlighting. I imagine that these are topics for Google Summer of Code 
improvements, but I don't think that adding them would be that difficult.

> If I had enough free time to learn Mercurial's concepts and put such an
> integration into place myself I'd be keen on doing so, but that's a
> conditional that returns FALSE for me pretty me universally these days.
>   

I think I probably considered adding Mercurial support to ViewVC in the 
beginning, but hgweb is fairly easy to style:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Theming

There are some drawbacks with the templating which probably don't exist 
in the ViewVC templating system, but it's quite straightforward to 
customise to a particular look and feel. I don't really have any 
preference for the usual styling of ViewVC, but I've not tried to 
re-style it either.

On the topic of Mercurial concepts in general, I've tried to improve the 
Mercurial Wiki documentation with respect to CVS-oriented usage and for 
those with a CVS-like background:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CvsLikePractice

The things to be most aware of are...

* Distributed means having your own copy of the whole repository history 
(which doesn't change anything from a ViewVC perspective, of course).
* Work done locally need not be shared until you are ready to do so.
* Operations are repository-wide, not file-oriented, so upon sharing 
changes and being warned about other people's commits involving 
different files (creating "new remote heads") may seem like a nuisance, 
but it makes sense from a repository-wide perspective (the state of the 
entire repository has changed in diverging ways).

But from a ViewVC perspective, where you have code ploughing through the 
history and building Web pages, there may be fewer differences than one 
might imagine.

Paul

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