bazaar/mercurial meeting

[John Arbash Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Martin Pool wrote:
> | Canonical (the corporate parent of bzr and Ubuntu) is hosting a sprint in
> | London in early June to bring together some of the core developers
> from bzr
> | and hg, to see if we can better cooperate.  Aaron, John, Robert and I are
> | going, and (I think) Bryan O'Sullivan, Matt Mackall, Benoit Boissinot,
> and
> | Thomas Arendsen Hein from hg.
> 
> I'm definitely intrigued by this.  Bzr and Hg are definitely the most
> similar projects out there: just look at our own feature chart:
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/RcsComparisons
> 

I didn't realize that hg had repositories. Though I guess I just found
out that with 'clone -U' you can prevent it from 'updating the working
directory' ie, don't create a working dir.

> Any kind of merger would be challenging, but there would definitely be
> advantages:
> ~ - More contributors
> ~ - More code
> ~ - The merged project becomes a more obvious choice than either Hg or bzr.

Yeah. The only problem is the semi-fundamental model differences. hg
follows the svn model of copy + delete rather than rename, and doesn't
use the concept of individual ids per file. (Hence probably has
difficulty with merging after renames). On the flip side, it supports
copying history, so that you can 'split' a file, and still retain the
ancestry for each line.

If it wasn't for that, I was curious if we could have actually used hg's
storage. (It would be slow for annotations, but is obviously fast for
other things).


> 
> But when we talk about a "merged project", we mean:
> ~ - Merged leadership
> ~ - Merged communities
> ~ - Merged coding cultures
> ~ - Merged codebases
> ~ - Merged infrastructure
> 
> This is a somewhat fearsome list, and I feel the only way it can work is
> with a positive attitude.  So the question I'll be asking is not "Can we
> make this work?", but "How can we make this work?".  And if the answer
> is "there's no way to make this work", that's okay.
> 
> A merger would involve compromise, but I wouldn't want bzr to lose
> anything important in a merger.
> 
> Aaron

I'm not sure how much we can actually merge versus just having a good
exchange of ideas between the two projects. But I would agree, if a
merge is possible, it could provide a lot of great benefits.

John
=:->


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