Re: extra head

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 08/16/2013 05:07 PM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> (Or an equally plausible scenario is that Ben pulled from the
> repository when the bookmark wasn't pointing at the most recent code.)

I think that is what happened in Ben's case.

Here is a snapshot of the current source tree from 
http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/:

age     author  description
60 minutes ago 	Rik 	doc: Rename @xcode macro to @tcode (transpose code) 
for clarity.default tip
15 hours ago 	Carnë Draug 	imwrite: add simple test for actual 
successfully writing
16 hours ago 	Carnë Draug 	imwrite: fix input checking for colormap (bug 
#39791)
18 hours ago 	Falk Tannhäuser 	__plt__.m: Fix legend when plotting 
vector against matrix (bug #39542)
24 hours ago 	John Donoghue 	Windows GUI: Reimplement tabbing in 
terminal window
26 hours ago 	Ben Abbott 	* scripts/plot/hold.m: Fix typo "vargin" -> 
"varargin".@
44 hours ago 	John Donoghue 	Windows GUI: clear any terminal selection 
when pressing a key/pasting to terminal.

I see the @ bookmark is not positioned at the tip; it's down at Ben's 
push from 26 hours ago.  Am I correct in assuming that neither John, 
Falk, Carnë nor Rik are using the @ bookmark, i.e., "hg update @"?  This 
means that anyone who does "hg update @" on the current repository will 
have a working copy with none of those changes.  When that person or 
persons does a push, there could be conflicts from time to time that 
require manual merging.

There is a nice in-depth discussion, with examples of bookmarks here:

http://mercurial.aragost.com/kick-start/en/bookmarks/

Unless everyone ties into the @ bookmark so that all pushes 
automatically update the bookmark, I'm wondering if a bookmark's only 
effect on a named branch is creating more possible work for those who 
are using "hg update @".

Bookmarks are nice, but it seems to me their advantage are for the 
following:

1) A developer who is working on multiple little projects, i.e., 
"multitasking".  For example, in a given day he may have started fixing 
something when he is called onto another more urgent fix.  Right now, 
what I'm doing for multiple projects is I reach a point where I want to 
break so I create a changeset patch and save that.  Then I rollback and 
work from the freshest canonical version.  When I want to go back to my 
work I do a normal "patch" command, rather than "hg patch".  With 
bookmarks, I can now simply create bookmarks for my various projects and 
"hg update XYZ" to swap back and forth.  Not bad.  But these are 
bookmarks I'm working with, not in the canonical source tree.

2) Two or a few developers who want to coordinate development on a small 
change, bouncing ideas to one another.  That's good.  However, in Octave 
development we currently have the same sort of thing with the Savannah 
patch and bug lists.  I don't think we'd want to abandon that for 
bookmarks because it has the benefit of a discussion record that others 
can engage in.  I'm left thinking that in Octave development the place 
where bookmarks add something is code sprints where two developers can 
work on a small project that might be done in a couple hours.

Dan