Tobias C. Rittweiler" wrote:

Hi Helmut,

I am currently in vacations, and don't have access to my machine, and as I don't think that I'm subscribed to the mailinglist (I usually use the gmane interface), I write this mail to you directly (feel free to forward.)

you wrote:

...

So lets make a poll. Those people with cvs commit rights can vote. Say which system you prefer; if you don't want to switch, vote for CVS. You can cast your ballot until 2008-March-07 00:00 UTC.

I'm reluctant to anything that there isn't an Emacs interface for that doesn't suck. Does one exist for Mercurial, and do you have experience using it?

In Emacs 23 (CVS Emacs) the vc interface supports hg, git, bzr and maybe others. But that is rather new and has still some rough edges. E.g. the vc-annotate for hg only shows the the revision number and the date but not the author who wrote the line. Another annoyance is that they synchronously call subprocesses the find-file-hook, apparently to display the version number in the mode-line. This can be rather slow (not so much for SLIME, but for big repos).

To create a changeset one must mark the relevant files in the vc-dired buffer and the marked files will then be committed together (not individually as in older versions). The diff command seem to work but it doesn't honor `diff-switches' properly. I think the log command works only on one file if called in the buffer or on multiple files if called in the vc-dired buffer. There are no Emacs equivalents for the status, pull, and push commands.

For git there exist some other Emacs packages, one is pcl-cvs-a-like. I wasn't impressed by those. The bzr-mode.el shipped with Bazaar was even written by the illustrious Luke Gorrie. Like his darcs-mode.el it's simple but easily hackable.

Currently, I use hg primarily from the command line.

Helmut.