[darcs-users] so long and thanks for all the darcs

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Sun Mar 4 04:03:54 UTC 2018


On Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:36:32 -0800
Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 6:26 PM, Karl O. Pinc <kop at meme.com> wrote:
> > This being so, I'm curious why a darcs user would choose
> > git over mercurial.  
> 
> Honestly, because I don't know mercurial.  I should fix that someday.
> My impression is that it's like git but with a more sensible command
> line interface, and has an elaborate plugin system with tons of
> extensions (which nice in a way but scary in another way).

It's not that the command line interface is more sensible.  It's
that the mental model of a repo with which the mercurial commands
interact is simple.  _Almost_ as simple as darcs.  And almost
the same as darcs.  I think the difference is that file name
changes are essentially deletes and adds in mercurial.

> Is there a document for mercurial from the perspective of darcs out
> there?

Dunno.  My head's not in revision control space right now but
what I recall is that you use "hg" instead of "darcs",
"commit" instead of "record", and "status" instead of
"whatsnew -l".  Then if you want to do anything "extra",
like rebase you look on the hg website for help, or IRC,
and turn on the extension.

I have the following hg extensions enabled:

 histedit      interactive history editing
 rebase        command to move sets of revisions to a different ancestor
 shelve        save and restore changes to the working directory
               ("git stash" equivalent)
 strip         strip changesets and their descendants from history

The mental model for hg is very like that of darcs.
In the time you spend figuring out how to get
git to show a diff of what's going to be committed
(the key idea being that --cached uses the "index",
which is where your next commit is "staged")
you should be able to use hg to do most all of
everything you'll ever need it to do.

Helpful commands are:

  hg help extensions
  hg help revisions
  hg help revsets

and possibly

  hg help phases
  hg help glossary

hg log --graph is like gitk.

That's about all I can recall, other than the hg website
is helpful.

Regards,

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein


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