Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit lost. Most of the discussions seem to focus on micromanagement of commits in your local HEAD branch.

I agree that the Git commands are pretty primitive (aka low-level). But eventually you can learn the good patterns and deal with that.

For me, the big question is how to manage a monorepo (with zillion of branches) so you can express which set of branches are relevant to your current concern at time T:

- focusing on the dev of a given set of features,

- frozing them into a delivery,

- pushing a stable monorepo+that frozen delivery to your validation platform,

- once validated, integrating that frozen delivery to one of the master branches of the monorepo,

- management of the many master branches corresponding to each subparts of the monorepo into a supermaster branch

Does this tool (or Mercurial in general) help with all that mono-repository branch management ?

Generally speaking, they simply don't use multiple branches on the central server. See https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

I've worked with Mercurial repos for 10+ years and only recently we've been migrating some of the smaller repos to Git primarily due to better supported tooling. Mercurial has done a great job in specific workflows especially with phases (which not everyone adopts) -- by default they disallow modifying public commits but allow modifying draft commits. I don't believe Git really has a similar concept, or at least not integrated at the same level. I recently read about `git push --force-if-includes` which seems like it's trying to address similar situations but mostly guessing based on comparing changesets present between two repos.

To your question about what/how Mercurial helps I'm guessing it's related to this, or other workflows enabled by Mercurial's Evolve/Topic features. It sounds like Sapling has adopted Evolve/Topics and making them functional on Git repositories though I'm not sure what it's doing under the hood.

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