What’s new in Git v1.8.4 Mercurial bridge

Git v1.8.4 has been released, and git-remote-hg received a lot of good updates, here’s a summary of them:

Precise branch tracking

Git is able to find out and report if a branch is new, if it needs to be updated, if it can be fast-forward or not, etc.

   b3f6f3a..c0d1c89  master -> master
 * [new branch]      new -> new
 ! [rejected]        bad -> bad (non-fast-forward)
 ! [rejected]        updated -> updated (fetch first)

Unfortunately, Mercurial’s code doesn’t make this easy (you can’t just push new bookmarks), but it has been worked around by writing a custom push() method.

In addition, if you use my patched version of Git (here), you can also use –force and –dry-run when pushing.

+ 51c1c5f...0faf0ed bad -> bad (forced update)

In short, git-remote-hg now makes interacting with Mercuerial repositories exactly the same as with Git ones, except for deleting remote branches (Mercurial just cannot do that).

Shared repository

One of the most useful features of Git (and that Mercurial doesn’t have), is remote name-spaces. So you can easily track “max/development”, “sarah/development”, etc. however, to properly track multiple Mercurial repositories, git-remote-hg needs to create a clone of the Mercurial repo, and if the repository is a big one, having multiple unrelated clones wastes a lot of space.

The solution is to use the Mercurial share extension, which is not really an extension, as it’s part of the core (but can only be used by activating the extension), so you can add as many Mercurial remotes as you want, and they would all share the same object store.

Use SHA-1’s to identify revisions

Previously, Mercurial revisions were stored as revision numbers (e.g. the tenth commit is stored as 10), which means if history is rewritten there’s no way to tell that the revision changed, so the Git commit wouldn’t change either (as it’s cached).

By using SHA-1’s, Mercurial revisions are always tracked properly.

Properly update bookmarks

Previously, Mercurial bookmarks were only fetched once, this is now fixed to always update them.

All extensions are loaded

This way all kinds of extensions the user has configured will affect git-remote-hg, for example the keyring extension.

Make sure history rewrites get updated

Before, Git would complain that a non-fast-forward updated happened–not any more.

Always point HEAD to “default”

Mercurial properly reports which is the current branch and bookmark, but only for local repositories. To get rid of the mismatch we always track “default”

Don’t force bookmark updates

We were inadvertently forcing the update of bookmarks, effectively overriding the previous one even if the update was not fast-forward.

Use Git author for lightweight tags

Unannotated tags don’t have an author in Git, but it’s needed for Mercurial, so instead of providing an empty author, use the one configured for Git.

Fix replacing a file with a directory

What’s next

There are few features missing, and they might not land in upstream Git any more, but:

Support for revision notes

This feature allows showing the Mercurial revision as Git notes:

commit 6c88a31540012991de3add247a958fd83531256f
Author: Felipe Contreras 
Date:   Fri Aug 23 13:00:30 2013 -0500

    Test

Notes (hg):
    e392886b34c2498185eab4301fd0e30a888b5335

---

If you want to have the latest fixes and features, you need to use my personal repository:

https://github.com/felipec/git

Unfortunately, you not only need the python script, but to compile Git itself to have all the benefits (like push –force and –dry-run).

Wiki

Also, there’s more information and detailed instructions about how to install and configure this remote-helper.

https://github.com/felipec/git/wiki/git-remote-hg

I’m now quite confident git-remote-hg is by far the best bridge between Git and Mercurial, and here’s a comparison between this and other projects.

Enjoy 🙂