DVCS comparison for our organisation: decided

[Ian Clatworthy]

Ben Finney wrote:
> Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> writes:

>> Please, help us find out how easy it is to support commit-time
>> actions and repository hooks for Bazaar. I'd hate to have our
>> organisation choose Mercurial merely because of ignorance of how to
>> use Bazaar's features.
> 
> Thanks to all who improved my understanding of the current state of
> Bazaar in this thread and others recently.

> Our organisation has chosen Mercurial, based largely on more-mature
> and better-documented support for repository commit-time actions.

Ben,

Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier about this and that it looks like
time is up w.r.t. making a choice.

We did add some improvements to the hooks doc in 0.91 but they weren't
rolled out well enough in two ways:

* it looks like 'latest' is still pointing to the 0.90 docs
* the hooks.txt ReST source never got converted to html on the web site.

I assume you found the information in the User Guide OK, namely
http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.0.91/en/user-guide/hooks.html? The link
there to
http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.0.91/en/user-reference/hooks.html isn't
working but the raw document is there with a .txt extension:
http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.0.91/en/user-reference/hooks.txt.

It's a fair comment that we could do a better job with packaging hooks
that we do. Right now, hooks can be arbitrary python code so they can do
pretty much anything you want. That's flexible but not to everyone's liking.

> We hold out hope of Bazaar coming out on top in a future VCS
> re-evaluation, but that will be some years away.

We do too. If you have a few moments, could you let us know what you
would have liked to have found in Bazaar, other than better doc? For
example:

1. Do we provide hooks in the places you need? (We have plans for
   better hooks support on the smart server but that will only
   help for orgs that *only* use that technology and not other
   technologies.)

2. Are there pre-packaged scripts we ought to provide for common
   hook tasks rather than leaving it up to users to provide the code?
   That sounds easy to do, either directly in the code base or on
   a wiki page.

For those that want the discipline it implies, PQM is a cool *addition*
to Bazaar. We need to get the core Bazaar product right regardless. Any
additional feedback you can provide us to make sure Bazaar Just Works
would be much appreciated.

Ian C.