Re: Git/Mercurial interoperability (and what about bzr?) (was: Re: [VOTE] git versus mercurial)

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
To: Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
Cc: Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Git/Mercurial interoperability (and what about bzr?) (was: Re: [VOTE]  git versus mercurial)
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:03:10 -0400 (EDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0810281052490.13034@xanadu.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0810281536360.27029@ds9.cixit.se>

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Peter Krefting wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin:
> 
> > While many may say that that is a half-baked solution, I actually
> > like it. Mercurial and Git are pretty similar in their concept (if
> > not in how the data is actually stored).
> 
> That touches on something that I have been thinking about for a while.
> 
> How difficult are the storage formats? Would it be possible, in a
> reasonable amount of work, to add support for the Mercurial protocol
> and format in "git clone", so that I could clone a Mercurial repository
> and work on it with Git, and then possibly use "git push" to possibly
> push the result back to Mercurial?

The git protocol is intimately tied to its repository storage format, 
making any interoperability at the protocol level really hard.  It is 
probably easier to perform the clone/push operations with native tools 
and do the interoperability dance locally between repositories, possibly 
with some wrappers hiding all the details.  In the end you could still 
be doing a "git push" but the native tool is best for handling transfer 
protocols.  Yes, there is git-cvsserver outperforming a real CVS server, 
but that's another story.

Nicolas