A few weeks ago we organized a mini-sprint on Evolve to improve the project documentation, smoothen some rough-edges and makes the project more newcomers friendly.

The sprint has gathered several folks:

• Boris Feld (me),
• Pierre-Yves David (Octobus Founder),
• Pulkit Goyal invited by Octobus,
• Denis Laxalde (from Logilab),
• Philippe Pépiot (from Logilab),
• Christophe de Vienne (from orus.io) who made a nice debrief,
• Aurélien campéas (from Pythonian),
• Ryan McElroy from (from Facebook).

The sprint was hosted by Logilab in Paris for two days. Thanks a lot!

The sprint was focused on three main goals:

Improve the documentation content

A big goal of the sprint was to improve the evolve documentation. Pierre-Yves, Philippe Pepiot and Ryan McElroy worked in this subject to:

• Update installation instructions to use pip, it should facilitate the extension installation for newcomers.
• Reorder and lighten the landing page.
• Various fixes of typos, cases consistency and general rewording.
• Missing and outdated content is now listed in a page, providing raw pointers. This should help reader to be aware of what they are missing and investigate on their own.
• Content from the inline documentation is now directly reused in the online sphinx documentation (eg: hg help amend).

The online documentation now reflect these changes.

Improve the documentation tooling

Multiple thing that was desperately missing from evolve tutorials were history graphs. We wanted to have graphs like this one:

We improved one of our extension, mercurial-docgraph, which can generate a graphviz img based on a Mercurial repository and a revset.

Boris Feld and Christophe de Vienne worked to:

• Make it a proper Mercurial extension.
• Add command line arguments to choose whether to output a png image or the graphviz dot content on stdout.
• Also add support for --sphinx-directive option that output a sphinx graphviz extension compatible directive on stdout.
• Work on grouping and aligning nodes.
• Polish the theme used.

The evolve tutorials are now updated with nice graphs.

Usability bugs

Pulkit Goyal worked on:

• Add the --current option to hg topic to helps setting the current topic to several changesets at the time.
• Restrict topic names to classic rules for tags and branches (no integer only name, no reserved words...).
• Add a new debugconvertbookmark command to convert bookmarks to topics.
• Improving various wording and rendering of various topic related commands.
• add a --interactive support for hg amend --extract (also known as uncommit).

Bugs cleaning

• Fix a bug where obsolete tag could sneak back into the tag file (issue5539).
• Improve behavior of rebase when obsolete and unstable revision are present (issue5300) (still in progress).

Thanks again to all attendees for the progress made and to Logilab for hosting. We are looking forward to the next mini-sprint.