September ’14 Mercurial Code Sprint

Joining me at the sprint were two of my colleagues Gregory Szorc (gps) and Mike Hommey (glandium). They took part in some of the serious discussions about core bugfixes and features that will help Mozilla scale its use of Mercurial. Impressively, glandium had only been working on the project for mere weeks, but was able to make serious contributions to the bundle2 format (an upcoming feature of Mercurial). Specifically, we talked to Mercurial developers about some of the difficulties and bugs we’ve encountered with Mozilla’s “try” repository due to the “tens of thousands of heads” and the events that cause a serving request to spin forever.

By trade I’m a sysadmin/DevOps person, but I also do have a coder hat that I don from time to time. Still though, the sprint was full of serious coders who seemingly worked on Mercurial full-time. There were attendees who had big named employers, some of whom would probably prefer that I didn’t reveal their identities here.

Unfortunately due to my lack of familiarity with a lot of the deep-down internals I was unable to contribute to some of the discussions. It was primarily a learning experience for me for both the process which direction-driving decisions are made for the project (mpm’s BDFL status) and all of the considerations that go into choosing a particular method to implement an idea.

That’s not to say I was entirely useless. My knowledge of systems and package management meant I was able to collaborate with another developer (kiilerix) to improve the Docker package building support, including preliminary work for building (un)official Debian packages for the first time.

I also learned about some infrequently used features or tips about Mercurial. For example, folks who come from a background of using git often complain about Mercurial’s lack of interactive rebase functionality. The “histedit extension provides this feature. Much like many other features of Mercurial, this is technically “in core”, but not enabled by default. Adding a line in the “[extensions]” section your “hgrc” file such as “histedit =” enables it. It allows all the expected picking, folding, dropping, editing, or modifying commit messages.

Changeset evolution is another feature that’s been coming for a long time. It enables developers to safely modify history and be able to propagate those changes to any down/upstream clones. It’s still disabled by default, but is available as an extension. Gregory Szorc, a colleague of mine, has written about it before. If you’re curious you can read more about it here.

One of the features I’m most looking forward to is sparse checkouts. Imagine a la Perforce being able to only check out a subtree or subtrees of a repository using --include subdir1/ and --exclude subdir2/ arguments during cloning/updating. This is what sparse checkouts will allow. Additionally, functionality is being planned to enable saved ‘profiles’ of subdirs for different uses. For instance, specifying the ‘–enable-profile mobile’ argument will allow a saved list of included and excluded items. This seems like a really powerful way of building lightweight build profiles for each different type of build we do. Unfortunately to be properly implemented it is waiting on some other code to be developed such as sharded manifests.

One last thing I’d like to tell you about is an upcoming free software project for Mercurial hosting named Kallithea. It was borne from the liberated code from the RhodeCode project. It is still in its infancy (version 0.1 as of the writing of this post), but has some attractive features for viewing repositories, such visualizations of changelog graphs, diffs, code reviews, a built-in editor, LDAP support, and even a JSON-RPC API for issue tracker integration.

In all I feel it was a valuable experience for me to attend that benefited both the Mercurial project and myself. I was able to lend some of my knowledge about building packages and familiarity with operations of large-scale hgweb serving, and was able to learn a lot about the internals of Mercurial and understand that even the deep core code of the project isn’t very scary.

I’m very thankful for my ability to attend and look forward to attending the next Sprint in the following year.