Mercurial unreliable sub-repos. Any alternative?

Question

I trying to like mercurial, but is driving me nuts.

I convert from SVN to it thinking in the promise of better workflows. Also, I use git in contract work, so I get the whole distributed idea. I choose mercurial for the promise of more simplicity and better windows support.

I'm a solo developer right now, working in a project that compromise 5 separate repos. Some commits are global and other locally applied to each one.

Normally, I commit each single repo, then fecth/push from the root.

But I found that:

• The 2 head thing. Exist a way to disable that forever?

• None of the GUI out there truly work for my workflow (I use MacHG, TortoiseHG, and try other half-attempts guis). I need to fall-back to command line for a workable push/pull behavior. No GUI understand subrepo, no understand that 2-head problem, so I need to fix/merge in command line.

• But the worst of all, is that subrepo are tooo unreliable. Almost each 2-3 days I get "abort: unknown revision **". Sometimes the hex value have a "+" at the end. Others not.

Sometimes is the ONLY change in the repo.

I don't wanna fix this behavior, I wanna a working replacement to subrepo, that let me:

• Commit each sub repo
• At the end, push+pull, automerge anything that make sense... and if work with the available GUIS better.

Answer 1

You are a bit confused in my humble opinion. Mercurial and GIT are distributed versoin control, so the repository is always...the same.

You have your own copy of the repository with all the history. There is no "sub"-repo.

All repositories are "peer", and you can use clone them to do "sub" developement. Every developer must have at least one peer repository.

Take a look at this good tutorial http://hginit.com/

Hope this helps