Forest Extension - Not to be found?

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 22:17 Mon 25 Jul     , Mario Torre wrote:
> Il giorno lun, 25/07/2011 alle 12.55 -0700, Kelly O'Hair ha scritto:
> > On Jul 25, 2011, at 10:45 AM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> > 
> > > 2011/7/25 10:06 -0700, kelly.ohair at oracle.com:
> > >> On Jul 25, 2011, at 10:03 AM, Mario Torre wrote:
> > >>> I would also like to amend the README files, so that every reference
> > >>> to the forest disappears, what do you think?
> > >> 
> > >> I thought that was already done.
> > > 
> > > I don't understand why people are so eager to wipe out all references
> > > to the forest extension.
> > > 
> > > It's a bit clunky, I agree, and the original author doesn't maintain
> > > it any more, but one Michael Tharp is maintaining a fork here:
> > > 
> > >  https://bitbucket.org/gxti/hgforest
> > > 
> > > I use this on a daily basis and it works fine.  Until and unless we
> > > replace the forest extension with something better than a shell script
> > > I suggest we refer people to this version as a viable alternative.
> > 
> > It broke with 1.8 and is broken again with 1.9. Each breakage creates pains
> > for multiple people and it is just a pain in my view.
> > 
> > Hopefully we will have a better alternative than a shell script soon, and when
> > that happens I'll re-adjust the Dev Guide to use that extension, although I do think
> > the Dev Guide spent too much time talking about forests than it should have.
> > Most developers work in one repository, and I think the guide should try and focus on that.
> > 
> > -kto
> > 
> 
> Honestly, to Kelly's point, I would say that forest should not be a
> mandatory feature, and although the script is less nice that the forest
> extension, the fact that this breaks from time to time is indeed
> irritating, especially since mercurial is released quite often, and we
> only maintain it for some very specific version of hg (usually the
> latest, as this is what we get from the Linux distributions we Free
> Software hippies tend to use), so we leave out all the other people that
> for one reason or another don't updated.
> 
> I still think we should support forests, but not to the point to make
> them mandatory and spend so much words in the documentation, especially
> (and this was the point of the original post), since our links are
> outdated. Well, that's just my point of view, that is :)
> 

Not only does it break regularly as it's not part of the upstream Mercurial project,
but the forest extension is slow.  I moved away from it in preference of my own shell
scripts while it still worked and to no apparent disadvantage.  Exactly what is the
benefit of it?

> Cheers,
> Mario
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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