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new Mercurial client? [message #1744922]

Sun, 02 October 2016 21:25

Ari Meyer

Messages: 12
Registered: July 2016

Junior Member

Hi,

The MercurialEclipse plugin appears to be totally dead -- no updates for 4 years, and no responses to bug reports. I was wondering how hard it would be to split off the eGit core into some kind of "Eclipse DVCS" project and build eGit and a Mercurial client off of it (as well as maybe for other DVCS's?).

Thanks!
Ari

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1744964 is a reply to message #1744922]

Mon, 03 October 2016 13:02

Andrey Loskutov

Messages: 79
Registered: July 2009

Member

No way. The design is totally diferent.

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1744989 is a reply to message #1744964]

Mon, 03 October 2016 20:20

Ari Meyer

Messages: 12
Registered: July 2016

Junior Member

Please explain. They are conceptually almost identical, and, from a user perspective, the primary differences are in their CLIs. It would seem, at least on the surface, that much of the core of eGit could be refactored into a separate project to serve as a common base for various DVCS Eclipse plugins.

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1745014 is a reply to message #1744989]

Tue, 04 October 2016 08:24

Christian Halstrick

Messages: 241
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

My feeling about this is also: no way. Even without knowing Mercurial very well I am sure a huge percentage of the EGit/JGit code base is very git specific. The differences between git and mercurial are big enough (how versions are adressed, how history rewriting is supported, ....) that this task of abstracting out the git specific parts could be a huge task.

Ciao
Chris

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1745064 is a reply to message #1745014]

Tue, 04 October 2016 17:46

Ari Meyer

Messages: 12
Registered: July 2016

Junior Member

Thanks for the details, Christian. I still think it would be worthwhile investigating what common core could be extracted from eGit. It's strange to me that, in the spirit of Eclipse, which exposes such a generic Team Provider interface, we can't put together some generic foundation for DVCS's. I don't know much about Bazaar, darcs, etc., but at least there should be much commonality that could be exploited between Git and Mercurial.

Obviously, Git dominates the DVCS mindshare now, with GitHub, etc., but there are innumerable open source projects using Mercurial, including Mozilla and OpenJDK, and many companies using it, including https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ . Why we can't have a first-class Team Provider for Mercurial, aside from lack of resources, is beyond me.

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1746420 is a reply to message #1745064]

Fri, 28 October 2016 13:06

Matthias Sohn

Messages: 943
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

- did you try to ask for a new release in their google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/MercurialEclipse ?
- looking at the repository the project doesn't seem to be dead: https://bitbucket.org/mercurialeclipse/main/commits/all
- the latest release I found on the Eclipse Marketplace is 2.2.0
- you can install this version like this:
- click "Help > Eclipse Marketplace"
- search for "mercurial"
- select "MercurialEclipse 2.2" and install it

looking at the date of the version number of the installed bundles it seems the release was created on Oct 22, 2016 which is pretty recent

I am not sure it would be useful to try extracting a common base, EGit relies on JGit API while MercurialEclipse calls external Mercurial command line.
The TeamProvider API in Eclipse is a pretty thin abstraction which helps to integrate different versioning systems in the Eclipse workbench but it
doesn't really help to implement a versioning system integration in Eclipse.

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1746446 is a reply to message #1746420]

Sat, 29 October 2016 02:42

Ari Meyer

Messages: 12
Registered: July 2016

Junior Member

Thanks, Matthias. I had first looked here: https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/mercurialeclipse , and it looks pretty bleak. I used the tool several years ago, and it was buggy, as many have mentioned. It certainly doesn't get the industry support that I assume eGit gets, or at least community, developers, and mindshare. I guess I still don't understand how a tool like eGit, for which I have to presume a very high percentage of the code is for the UI, can't share that UI code. The underlying DVCS calls would obviously be completely different, but conceptually, they are incredibly similar tools, and I would presume that much of the Eclipse UI code could be shared. Am I completely off here?

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1749105 is a reply to message #1746446]

Thu, 01 December 2016 21:44

Matthias Sohn

Messages: 943
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Looking at the contribution statistics [1] it seems the main problem of the mercurialeclipse project is a lack of contributors.
Why do you think starting another implementation trying to reuse some of the EGit code would fix this problem ?

And I think you should listen to Andrey's advise since he was one of the main contributors for mercurialeclipse [2] and
he is an active EGit committer so he knows both projects very well.

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/mercurialeclipse/contributors/summary
[2] https://www.openhub.net/p/mercurialeclipse/contributors

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Re: new Mercurial client? [message #1750186 is a reply to message #1749105]

Sat, 17 December 2016 01:42

Ari Meyer

Messages: 12
Registered: July 2016

Junior Member

Thanks, Matthias (guess I forgot to click to get notified on this topic again). If Andrey really thinks all that UI code can't be shared, then I won't push it. Without knowing either codebase, it still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me, intuitively.

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