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Since the sapling client is a fork from Mercurial does that mean it can also be used with Mercurial repositories in addition to Git repositories or is that not supported?

In order to work with Git repositories is this essentially the Mercurial client using hg-git on a converted repo under the hood?

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Unfortunately you can't use Sapling with Mercurial repositories. There are too many differences at this point.

This does not use hg-git under the hood. Sapling's internal structure differs from Mercurial in substantial ways, and we've built some cleaner layering that allowed us to shim Git in under our storage layer. This also means that we read and write directly to the git repo, instead of duplicating and importing all the data like hg-git did. This has some nice benefits, like the hashes you see in the output are actually Git hashes.

https://sapling-scm.com/docs/internals/internal-difference-h... briefly explains the Git support. Currently we keep trees and blobs in a git bare repo unchanged, but convert the commit graph to our format so we can run our own graph algorithms. In the future we might store trees and blobs differently too.

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