Version Control System - Mercurial

[WesleySmith]

I was wondering if anyone else is using Mercurial as their version control system and could give me some advice.

We have noticed that when you open and save a window created using the AppBuilder the frame definitions change sequence in the file - even if you don't make any changes to the procedure and/or the field definitions in a frame move. These then get picked up by Mercurial as a change set including any changes we have also made.

For the most part this does not cause too much of a problem because you can simply commit and push your changes. However, this behaviour does cause some problems if you need to merge two files and the definitions have moved. Mercurial does attempt to resolve the merge but if a conflict occurs it pops you into KDiff3 to resolve manually and this can become very time consuming determining what should/shouldn't be included in the output from the merge.

I have spoken to Progress who investigated the frame definition sequence moving in the hope that there was a setting which would "fix" the definitions and stop them moving. The impression I got was they were suprised the definitions moved (They replicated the problem) but advised that there was no intention in resolving it at the moment because it has been like this for a number of releases. They also confirmed there was no setting to "fix" the definitions.

So, this got me wondering... Surely others must be experiencing this problem, and how do they handle this.

Does anyone have any advise/tips on this?

 

[Marian EDU]

Well, we use Mercurial for all projects but not much UI going on so we don't have any issues with it... however this isn't really related to Mercurial and as the file actually change content any SCM will spot that and mark it for commit.

The issue seems to be that for a (probably small) change in the window file when saving it the content is completely re-arranged and this results in a lot of 'changes' you have to deal with in the merge process... not a very SCM friendly UI designer

Mercurial can't help you with that, changing code block position is something that in many cases is quite important... I wonder how RoundTable handle something like that.

 

[WesleySmith]

this isn't really related to Mercurial and as the file actually change content any SCM will spot that and mark it for commit.

Yes, you are correct this must affect any SCM because the file content has been changed.

changing code block position is something that in many cases is quite important

This is what I don't understand. If I make my changes using a procedure editor the frame definitions do not change position and does not cause any problems running our application. When I originally spoke to Progress about this they gave me the impression that they were suprised the definitions moved.

Anyhow, I would still be interested to know how other users are handling this.