pko.ch

Today, I discovered some Mercurial extensions that will, forseeabily, make me more productive.

• Shelve: No more diff mangling.
• Bookmarks: A pretty good interpretation on what local branches should be. Matches perfectly with my idea of them.
• Win32text: No more newline mambo-jumbo.

Enjoy them too!

Pre scriptum: This was dangling in my drafts forever. I just decided to post it as it is.

In this post: Why I use Mercurial (sometimes abbreviated as hg) but not Git, and why I like it.

One day, some moons ago, I watched a presentation with Linus on Git, and how it would forever change our life. He explained why it’s a must-use on a very big distributed team or/and at a personal level. I mostly agreed. I still thought this was just a clever hack to solve merge conflits on svn and keep changes controlled on a mental level. CVS is dead, SVN is not. For most small teams, SVN is just a shortcut for the common workflow one would do with git, except for one little thing: you commit locally, and publish as needed.

Mercurial, or any DSCM, is great for detaching the act of committing work (accepting it as a valid step towards a goal) from the act of publishing work (putting your modifications up for other parties).

I prefer Mercurial over Git for the polish and supporting the anti-”linus is god” movement. I really didn’t like the way I was told he dismissed the idea of using incremental logs. I’m not being an extremist, or i would use Codeville.

It all began with me wanting Mergurial (hg for short) on Bluehost. I find mercurial as good as git but with more polish. I just followed some tutorial to get hg on Bluehost, and it was good.

However, I longed for more. Pylons more. It’s a lot of packages to install, so I really didn’t want to do it by hand. If I resign to do it this time, it will happen on my next coding whim too. I tried to use ez_setup, but it would screw up with my prefix. Tried virtual python from the easy_install guys, no go either. Tried messing with PYTHONPATH, PATH and the like, but it became really ugly really fast.

Bluehost’s python is very old. Has a big beard and all. Bluehost already forces me to use cgi after all, so i get to choose who runs the script. It might as well be my own version of python. And so it was! Grabbed the source, built it with a prefix and, lo and behold, I had a shiny python working. That simple. The night before it was configuration madness. This time, ./configure --PREFIX=$HOME/local && make && make install or some cash equivalent operation. All went good from there.

Lesson learned: In shared hosting, when forced to use cgi, ./configure --PREFIX=$HOME/local goes a long way. Use it!