Mercurial server-side clone support for Project Hosting on Google Code
When we
launched Mercurial support our goal was to get
to a point where we could enable a social coding experience. Today, I am happy to announce
that today we have support for both 'project' clones and 'user' clones.
Project owners can now create multiple repositories for their project, and they can
choose to make any of those new repositories a clone of any of the project's other
repositories. These project clones share the same commit access permissions as the original
project and make it easier for project members to work together on new features. A common
pattern in the Mercurial world is to place each "official" branch into a separate repository
with naming conventions like "project-crew", "project-stable", and so on.
In addition to project clones, any user can visit any Mercurial repository and create a
server-side user clone of that repository, without asking permission from the project owner.
These personal user clones can be easily shared with other developers -- who also can make a
clone of that clone. Once a user has finished her changes in a user clone, she can coordinate
with the canonical project's contributors to review and incorporate her changes.
User clones aren't
forks, in the traditional sense, where a fork has little intention
to contribute back to the original project. Rather, the entire purpose of a user clone is to
allow users to contribute to projects without requiring official commit access permissions.
Because mercurial is a distributed (peer-to-peer) version control system, it excels at
branching and merging. If the project maintainers like the new code, they just "pull" the
changesets from the clone and merge them into an official project repository. It's all much
more elegant than emailing patches back and forth, anonymous contributors get to use the same
tools as core developers.
The instructions for creating a user clone
can be found on the checkout page for any Mercurial project (e.g.
twisty) and existing clones for a project can be found under
the Clones sub-tab under Source.
Please let us know if you have any
feedback or find any
issues.
Happy cloning!
By Nathaniel Manista and Jacob Lee, Project Hosting on Google Code
