In late September, I participated on behalf of Logilab to the Mercurial 4.4 sprint that held at Facebook Dublin. It was the opportunity to meet developers of the project, follow active topics and forthcoming plans for Mercurial. Here, I'm essentially summarizing the main points that held my attention.

Amongst three days of sprint, the first two mostly dedicated to discussions and the last one to writing code. Overall, the organization was pretty smooth thanks to Facebook guys doing a fair amount of preparation. Amongst an attendance of 25 community members, some companies had a significant presence: noticeably Facebook had 10 employees and Google 5, the rest consisting of either unaffiliated people and single-person representing their affiliation. No woman, unfortunately, and a vast majority of people with English as a native or dominant usage language.

The sprint started by with short talks presenting the state of the Mercurial project. Noticeably, in the state of the community talk, it was recalled that the project governance now holds on the steering committee while some things are still not completely formalized (in particular, the project does not have a code of conduct yet). Quite surprisingly, the committee made no explicit mention of the recurring tensions in the project which recently lead to a banishment of a major contributor.

Facebook, Google, Mozilla and Unity then presented by turns the state of Mercurial usages in their organization. Both Facebook and Google have a significant set of tools around hg , most of them either aiming at making the user experience more smooth with respect to performance problems coming from their monorepos or towards GUI tools. Other than that, it's interesting to note most of these corporate users have now integrated evolve on the user side, either as is or with a convenience wrapper layer.

After that, followed several "vision statements" presentations combined with breakout sessions. (Just presenting a partial selection.)

The first statement was about streamlining the style of the code base: that one was fairly consensual as most people agreed upon the fact that something has to be done in this respect; it was finally decided (on the second day) to adopt a PEP-like process. Let's see how things evolve!

Second, Boris Feld and I talked about the development of the evolve extension and the ongoing task about moving it into Mercurial core (slides). We talked about new usages and workflows around the changeset evolution concept and the topics concept. Despite the recent tensions on this technical topic in the community, we tried to feel positive and reaffirmed that the whole community has interests in moving evolve into core. On the same track, in another vision statement, Facebook presented their restack workflow (sort of evolve for "simple" cases) and suggested to push this into core: this is encouraging as it means that evolve-like workflows tend to get mainstream.

Another interesting vision statement was about using Rust in Mercurial. Most people agreed that Mercurial would benefit from porting its native C code in Rust, essentially for security reasons and hopefully to gain a bit of performance and maintainability. More radical ideas were also proposed such as making the hg executable a Rust program (thus embedding a Python interpreter along with its standard library) or reimplementing commands in Rust (which would pose problems with respect to the Python extension system). Later on, Facebook presented mononoke, a promising Mercurial server implemented in Rust that is expected to scale better with respect to high committing rates.

Back to a community subject, we discussed about code review and related tooling. It was first recalled that the project would benefit from more reviewers, including people without a committer status. Then the discussion essentially focused on the Phabricator experiment that started in July. Introduction of a web-based review tool in Mercurial was arguably a surprise for the community at large since many reviewers and long-time contributors have always expressed a clear preference over email-based review. This experiment is apparently meant to lower the contribution barrier so it's nice to see the project moving forward on this topic and attempt to favor diversity by contribution. On the other hand, the choice of Phabricator was quite controversial. From the beginning (see replies to the announcement email linked above), several people expressed concerns (about notifications notably) and some reviewers also complained about the increase of review load and loss of efficiency induced by the new system. A survey recently addressed to the whole community apparently (no official report yet at the time of this writing) confirms that most employees from Facebook or Google seem pretty happy with the experiment while other community members generally dislike it. Despite that, it was decided to keep the "experiment" going while trying to improve the notification system (better threading support, more diff context, subscription-based notification, etc.). That may work, but there's a risk of community split as non-corporate members might feel left aside. Overall, adopting a consensus-based decision model on such important aspects would be beneficial.

Yet another interesting discussion took place around branching models. Noticeably, Facebook and Google people presented their recommended (internal) workflow respectively based on remotenames and local bookmarks while Pulkit Goyal presented the current state to the topics extension and associated workflows. Bridging the gap between all these approaches would be nice and it seems that a first step would be to agree upon the definition of a stack of changesets to define a current line of work. In particular, both the topics extension and the show command have their own definition, which should be aligned.

(Comments on reddit.)