Heptapod and Mercurial

Modern Mercurial

Mercurial is a versioning tool like Git (same generation and similar theoretical bases). For very simple things, it is quite similar to Git. However, there are also important differences.

The software forges GitHub and GitLab do not support Mercurial. Git became for open-source THE tool used for versioning all kinds of projects.

However, Mercurial has been used in companies of all sizes for years and grew up as a great tool, with advantages compared to Git, in particular in terms of simple user interface, safety (no force push needed, no destructive history edition), performance for big repositories (with a growing part written in Rust) and collaborative history edition (with this Mercurial extensions [evolve] and [topic]).

We use Mercurial instead of Git. I (Pierre Augier) think that modern Mercurial with Heptapod can be a good technical choice for this project; in addition, using Mercurial for this project would tend to increase the diversity in terms of versioning tools which is a good thing considering the current situation of Git monopoly.

Heptapod, GitLab and GitHub

Heptapod is a GitLab fork supporting Git and Mercurial. GitLab is an open-source development platform. In contrast to GitHub, which is a proprietary platform (owned by Microsoft), instances of GitLab or Heptapod can be hosted by anyone (for example universities or public institutions).

However, since most potential developers are used to Git, it represents a technical barrier for contribution. We try to make this barrier as small as possible by providing good documentation on contributing with Heptapod and Mercurial.

Important

• Unless you really know what you’re doing, install and setup Mercurial as described here: Install and setup Mercurial.

• Unless you really know what you’re doing, before contributing, read at least this page and the first sections of Mercurial workflow.

Get the developer or maintainer role

No need to fork the repositories to contribute! The first step instead is to log in on https://foss.heptapod.net (one can use a GitHub or GitLab account) and send a message in this issue to get the “developer” or “maintainer” role for https://foss.heptapod.net/py-edu-fr.

Contribute via the web interface

Once you became “developer” or “maintainer” of the project, you can modify a file via the web interface. Click on edit in the Heptapod interface showing a file, edit the file and commit the changes in a new GitLab branch.

Important

Since the GitLab branch HAS to corresponds to a Mercurial [topic], you HAVE to choose a name in the form topic/default/my-nice-topic-name (replace my-nice-topic-name with something appropriate).

Contribute with local development using Mercurial

Contribution with a local repository is explained in details in Mercurial workflow but you first need to install and setup Mercurial. For that, don’t try to guess and just follow Install and setup Mercurial.