[Adium-devl] Mercurial mirror for Adium

[Colin Barrett]

I wrote a blog entry[1] about this, but it would be the epitome of  
hubris to assume all of you read my blog.

I've set up a Mercurial[2] repository mirror[3] for Adium so folks can  
play with a DVCS for working with Adium.  I just set it up to update  
every hour, thus making it a useful place to clone from.

To use it, run:

hg clone http://evilfork.com/hg/adium/trunk-only

I recommend the hgbook[4] for a good intro to Mercurial. The Mercurial  
website is also a good resource.

You'll still need to generate diffs and apply those to an svn checkout  
to commit, but that should not be too bad, since you can generate a  
diff exactly against the revision that is svn head (or of one hour  
ago, at least). It's how I work with Mercurial at work to commit to  
CVS and it works fine.

Why Mercurial?
---------------------
I know I said some not so positive things about it in the past, but it  
turns out those were untrue. Branches don't get eaten when doing  
merges -- the "inactive" thing in the list just means it doesn't have  
a head (revision with no children). You can still check it out, diff  
against it, commit a child revision, etc.

Also, mercurial is pretty easy to use. The interface is simple, and a  
number of more useful, but escoteric things are included as extensions  
(which you need to enable explicitly). Check out the hgbook, it's a  
good introduction to DVCSes and to Mercurial in general.

I'll be writing another blog post about ways of using Mercurial that  
I've found are useful, especially when you need to create patches  
(Mercurial includes an excellent extension called mq, which is  
basically a really nice version of the quilt scripts. It's similar to  
stgit).

Hope someone finds this useful!
-Colin

[1]: http://iamthewalr.us/blog/2007/10/10/mercurial-for-adium/
[2]: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
[3]: http://evilfork.com/hg/adium/trunk-only
[4]: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/