Re: Git haas gone wild (Rust), freebsd-update

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 07:46:23 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> --------
> Josef 'Jeff' Sipek writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 19:01:27 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> > > --------
> > > Josef 'Jeff' Sipek writes:
> > > 
> > > > > > > Or switch to Mercurial, https://www.mercurial-scm.org/ and declare git
> > > > > > > as obsolete  
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > I think that's an excellent idea, for both technical and social reasons!
> > > 
> > > I seem to remember that we had a huge VCS shootout back in previous times
> > > and that hg basically lost because they had no way to truly "obliterate"
> > > a commit, if for instance laywers waved a credible cease&desist letter.
> >
> > Taking a quick look, it looks like the revlog format hg uses has the correct
> > bits to allow for censoring of parts of history.  So, it should work with
> > minimal fuss.  (I've never used this feature, so maybe there is more to it.)  
> 
> I'm not totally up on the details, but I as I recall, the position of the
> "VCS-selection-team" was that leaving the legally challenged stuff in the
> repos, even if administratively maked out of bounds were not good enough.

That makes sense.  The way hg implemented censoring (at least based on a
quick read of some docs & code) is that the "bad" content is overwritten and
a flag is added to the revlog to avoid checksum errors later on.  I'd have
to experiment with it to see how censoring works in practice.

hg also has the concept called changeset evolution where it can keep track of
old commit hash->new commit hash mapping as commits get rewritten.  This
then informs the rest of hg about how to handle certain conflicts.  The
intended usecase for this is multiple devs sharing a repo to iterate on some
code without the super annoying conflicts that such sharing entails (anyone
who's tried this with git knows how terrible the experience is without extra
tooling/vcs that helps in any way).

Like I said, I love hg but switching to it would be a huge amount of work
and so I don't expect FreeBSD to do that.  It likely would be better use of
time to teach hg how to work on git repos.

Jeff.