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Hg advent init

kamalmarhubi.com

25 pointskalmar4 comments

To the author - I'm in the opposite boat where I've used mercurial for nearly 10 years but any time I try to use git I get lost. Everything in your post rung out to me as why I rather enjoy and understand hg (with exception to absorb which I haven't yet tried).

I highly recommend checking out this blog which discusses adding a command which is a customized log. It's made getting a visible understanding of my working state & phases tremendously easy.

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...

Additionally if you're planning to use evolve, most of the instructions I've seen for using it indicate installing it via pip, however I've only run into issues with that (as well as coworkers and others). Instead I recommend cloning the evolve repository and pointing the extension location to it (seen in .hgrc gist below). Upgrading is as simple as going into the evolve repo and running `hg up`. I can't wait until it's shipped with mercurial. The evolve repo can be cloned from:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve

This is from my .hgrc (for a mac) which customized the wip colors a bit more (and fixes a recent issue where one of the original revset commands used by the blog has been deprecated/removed).

https://gist.github.com/neandrake/e770ea7b3d6bf8299f6be2ca08...

Author here. Those are great tips, thanks! I actually just installed evolve from pip last night. I'll probably borrow from your hgrc, or at least let it inspire me :-)

> I'm in the opposite boat where I've used mercurial for nearly 10 years but any time I try to use git I get lost.

Very interesting! Do you end up using it as a client to git repos?

I've been able to avoid git repos for the most part, or the few times I've had to interact with them I've kept it a bare minimum of contribution to avoid any complex workflow. It's not the best idea especially since the industry still largely uses git, however I haven't had the appropriate occasion to learn git while also learning the project and commit the git process to memory. I've heard you can use hg on git repos but I haven't investigated using that yet. By far I think the things that confuse me most are I believe two points you brought up in your post -- local vs. public changesets, and working in a detached head state (working on a feature branch and then rebasing onto primary branch for landing). I think on top of that I get overly confused when github is thrown into the mix as again I've not sat down to learn the process since it comes up only sporadically.

unnamed branches

A pretty good description of how Mercurial handles this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/02/mercurial-workflows-branch...

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