Proper tracking of file-level operations: rename, directories, merges

[Martin Geisler]

Barry Warsaw <barry at canonical.com> writes:

> On Oct 25, 2011, at 10:58 AM, Martin Geisler wrote:
>
>> Fixing it would violate our backwards compatibility rules. We
>> maintain a stable output format so that people can write shell
>> scripts and whatnot around Mercurial -- the output of 'hg status' is
>> probably the most important output of them all.
>>
>> Personally, I think that's a little backwards, but that's how it is.
>> People who want a more high-level API are welcome to use something
>> like JavaHg[1] or python-hglib[2].
>
> That's another interesting distinction between Mercurial and Bazaar, I think.
> In some sense the `bzr` command is just a thin layer on top of a library, and
> it's the library which makes guarantees about API stability.  I think that's a
> much more sane guarantee to make.  IIUC, Mercurial does not make that same
> guarantee about its core library.  I could be wrong about that, but that's
> what I learned after discussions of the issue at last year's PyCon.

No, that's still correct. We sometimes change the internal Python API,
but not too much since it's also annoying for us when we have to update
our code to match an API change :-)

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/
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