[Yanel-dev] New toolbar (using superfish) doesn't use full width re menu items on IE

[Cedric Staub]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 12:13:03AM +0100, Michael Wechner wrote:
> We are investigating Mercurial and actually have been offered some great 
> help by Martin Geisler.
> We are currently exporting our public SVN to test a migration (Maybe you 
> want to talk to Simon), 

Cool.

> but to be honest I am not sure yet if it really 
> will help actually solve the problems discussed above.

No, it doesn't magically solve the mentioned problems. But what it does
is give you more powerful tools that you can use to optimize your
workflow. How one uses those tools is up to the developer. But it's not
just the version control system, it's the web frontend that integrated
with the system that is more important in my opinion because it makes
sure you don't forget about issues, new branches, bugfixes and so forth.

> I would suggest let's simulate the toolbar example based on your 
> suggestions above in order
> to find out what problems it will solve and which other problems will 
> need to be tackled differently.

Alright, so here's how I think the workflow could work:

- Keep the latest revision in a branch called stable
- Start developing the new toolbar in a branch called toolbar
- Develop a new sitetree resource in a branch called sitetree

Imagine Simon wants you to test the new toolbar, and I want you to test
the new sitetree. With Subversion we would have to to this:

- Simon generates toolbar patch
- Cedric generates sitetree patch
- Michael downloads patch
- Michael applies toolbar patch manually
- Michael tests toolbar patch
- Michael removes toolbar patch by reverting files
- Michael downloads sitetree patch
- Michael applies sitetree patch manyally
- Michael tests sitetree patch
- Michael removes sitetree patch by reverting files
- If the patches need improvement, start all over

And of course, this only works if the patches we both wrote don't
conflict with any local changes you might have on your system (say if
you're fixing a bug in the current sitetree). With a distributed system,
it would be possible to do the following:

- Simon and Cedric develop in separate branches
- Michael switches to toolbar branch*
- Michael tests the new feature
- Michael switches to sitetree branch*
- Michael tests the new feature
- Michael switches back to stable branch

* This is completely automatic and makes sure that the local changes you
might have in your repository are left untouched. When you switch back
to your own branch, everything is the same way it was before with no
conflicts or anything.

So simply put: Because the process is easier, you can now perform more
work in less time. But that doesn't allow you to track issues yet
however. So I think a web interface with tracking capabilities is just as
important.

Cheers
Cedric