[CALUG] Mercurial appropriate for Tomboy and documents?

[Dave Dodge]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:52:50PM -0400, P Yasuda wrote:
> I'm thinking of installing Mercurial distributed source control
> management tool. Would it work for my Tomboy notes directory?

It should work for documentation, though it's best for diff/merge
purposes if the file format being managed is text-based.  The only
thing that jumps out as a possible issue is that if Tomboy is managing
the files (I don't know much about Tomboy) then it might take a bit of
work to figure out how to get them to work together smoothly.  For
example Mercurial will expect all of the files being managed to be in
a single directory tree with an ".hg" subdirectory to hold the
metadata, and it's easiest if there's no unmanaged files littering the
directories.

> I would like to have different branches for specific job openings,
> but be able to easily merge changes back into the trunk.

The term "branch" is a tricky one because git and hg have subtle
distinctions in what they mean by that.  For example I believe git
prefers to have multiple branches in the same repository with one of
them visible at any given time, while with hg it's probably easier if
you have a separate repository for each branch.  The way a branch
identifier gets attached to changesets is also a bit different.  hg
can support git-style branches via extensions, and of course git can
also do hg's multiple-repository approach.  Their default behavior is
fairly different but when you take add-ons and extensions into account
they're pretty much on par feature-wise.

> I chose Mercurial because it sounds more n00b friendly than git,

If you're already a subversion user then hg's basic command set and
workflow will probably be more familar than git's.  Otherwise it might
not matter so much.  I know at one time hg was considered to have much
better user documentation but git might have caught up in that regard.


I've been using hg for years but my initial choice (over git or bzr)
was mostly due to already being a user of "quilt" with svn.  Mercurial
with the "mq" extension is pretty much identical to that (but better).

                                                  -Dave Dodge