Because he lost data? hg rm wouldn't ever lose data. He probably used an hg strip (which is an advanced command and must specifically be enabled in .hgrc through the mq extension) but didn't realize what he was doing...
The command that lost data was hg qdel. Strip won't lose data; it dumps bundles (although they're a pain in the ass to restore from). Like I said, I used Mercurial for three years. And not "I play with it sometimes at night" kind of used, but rather "it was my main version controls system all day, every day" kind of used. I was using MQ for most of that time.
The fact that so many people consider "hg strip" an advanced command is part of the problem. Modifying history should not be considered advanced. Being able to recover from ANY command, including destructive ones, should not be considered optional.
Yes, so that deletes a patch. Anything in patches is basically in flux, and I wouldn't call losing a patch "data loss". If you call hg qdel "data loss", you'd call any sort of modification to a patch "data loss", since patches aren't versioned. If you want versioning with patches, use pbranches.
> Modifying history should not be considered advanced.
Maybe, but the only way I modify history in practice is through rebasing. I've never ever felt the need to modify history any other way. What use case do you have for modifying history in potentially destructive ways?
Git gives me everything I needed MQ for, but with the complete safety of the reflog. There is no such thing as a change I can't undo. The fact that patch management is "special" in Mercurial is the problem!
With respect to history modification:
First, I rebase a couple dozen times per day. I'm on a team that doesn't use merges unless we have a reason to (this makes it easier to bisect and think about history). I also create, destroy, and rebase many of my own branches every day.
Second, I amend commits a lot. I'll often spike some little piece of code I don't understand, then start amending the commit as I rewrite it with TDD, until the commit no longer contains any traces of the original spiked version. For more complex spikes and TDD rewrites, I'll do it over many commits, rebasing the spike over the rewritten version until the spike commit is empty and gets skipped by the rebase. Doing that in Mercurial would be... arduous. I can easily do multiple history rewrites per minute while doing this.
Third, I amend commit messages a lot, usually with "git rebase -i". Maybe I forgot the ticket number, or maybe the meaning of the commit changed (see the next point).
Fourth, I sometimes do drastic commit rearranging. This is harder to explain, but it usually involves splitting commits (in the simple case) or moving sets of related changes from one commit to another (in the complex case). These are sometimes at the file level, sometimes at the hunk level, and sometimes within a hunk. This is rarer than the others; I probably do it once or twice per week.
Fifth, I "git reset <ref>" a lot. It took me longer to start doing this, but it's useful in a lot of situations. For example, "oops, I accidentally created a merge bubble."
Yep – and I did it all, using those tools, for a couple of years. :) Now, when I go back to Mercurial (which I know better than Git, mind you), I get frustrated. Those tools are much more blunt than their Git equivalents.
so i tried it for a couple of days, and the speed was the thing that impressed me the most actually. the rest is not that dissimilar, but i didn't dislike it as much as i thought i would :) - our workflow assumes mq already so a git add is a qnew, or qref, a git diff --cache is a qdiff, a git diff is an hg diff ... so on. most commits i make are usually a qfinish, which is comparable to a git commit (no -a).
how do you manage patch queues in git? we need them because we are constantly backporting to different versions of our app. branches will mean n merges for n versions. stacked git? or is there a git native way to manage the same?
what about something like tortoisehg? gitk is pretty crude in comparison.
i assume one can glue a diff/merge tool like meld. is the experience similar when resolving conflicts?
