With Mozilla’s migration from hg.mozilla.org to Github drawing near, the clock
is ticking for developers still using Mercurial to find their new workflow. I
previously blogged about how Jujutsu can help here, so please check that post
out first if you aren’t sure what Jujutsu is, or whether it’s right for you. If
you know you want to give it a shot, read on for a tutorial on how to get
everything set up!
We’ll start with an existing Mercurial clone of mozilla-unified, convert it to
use git-cinnabar and then set up Jujutsu using the co-located repo method.
Finally I’ll cover some tips and tricks for using some of the tooling that
relies on version control.
Read more →One of the pleasures of working at Mozilla, has been learning and using the
Mercurial version control system. Over the past decade, I’ve spent countless
hours tinkering my worfklow to be just so. Reading docs and articles,
meticulously tweaking settings and even writing an extension.
I used to be very passionate about Mercurial. But as time went on, the
culture at Mozilla started changing. More and more repos were created in
Github, and more and more developers started using git-cinnabar to work on
mozilla-central. Then my role changed and I found that 90% of my work was
happening outside of mozilla-central and the Mercurial garden I had created
for myself.
So it was with a sense of resigned inevitability that I took the news that
Mozilla would be migrating mozilla-central to Git. The fire in me was all but
extinguished, I was resigned to my fate. And what’s more, I had to agree. The
time had come for Mozilla to officially make the switch.
Glandium wrote an excellent post outlining some of the history of the
decisions made around version control, putting them into the context of the
time. In that post, he offers some compelling wisdom to Mercurial holdouts like
myself:
I’ll swim against the current here, and say this: the earlier you can switch
to git, the earlier you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work for you,
whether you already know Git or not.
When I read that, I had to agree. But, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
No, if I was going to have to give up my revsets and changeset obsolesence and
my carefully curated workflows, then so be it. But damnit! I was going to
continue using them for as long as possible.
And I’m glad I didn’t switch because then I stumbled upon Jujutsu.
Read more →