How To Transition from Teamware to Mercurial at OpenSolaris.org

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Transitioning from Teamware to Mercurial

Note: Text in bolded italics indicates text to type at the command line.

Following is a list of high-level differences between Teamware (TW) and Mercurial (Hg).

Philosophy

TW: you check individual files out (sccs edit), one at a time
Hg: you "check out" the entire workspace by updating your working directory
Discussion: Context is everything.

Metadata storage

TW: each sub-directory has an SCCS sub-dir, and metadata files are stored under there.
Hg: there is a top-level .hg sub-dir and metadata files are stored under there
Discussion: Note that Teamware has metadata files sprinkled all over the workspace whereas Hg has them all in a central location (sort of like the difference between breadth-first and depth-first searches).

Initial workspace creation

TW: bringover
Hg: hg clone
Discussion: Teamware uses the same command to create a workspace as to update one; Hg uses separate commands.

Daily updates

TW: bringover
Hg: hg pull then hg update or just hg pull -u
Discussion: Teamware's update command updates the metadata as well as the data, whereas Hg uses one command to update the metadata (pull) and another to update the data from the metadata (update), though they can be combined.

Merging changes

TW: after bringover, use resolve
Hg: after pull, use hg merge
Discussion: The CLIs are similar, but they are different in behavior. In particular, see Merging Conflicting Changes, especially the paragraph starting with "Note that Mercurial's definition..." for a more complete explanation.

Nightly check-ins

TW: sccs delget adds a delta to the target file(s)
Hg: hg commit adds a change-set incorporating all edited files
Discussion: These are similar, but by default Mercurial operates on the entire workspace, not on individual files.

History

TW: sccs prt to show changes for a single file
Hg: hg log to show revisions over the entire workspace
Discussion: These are similar, but by default Mercurial operates on the entire workspace, not on individual files.

Advanced usage

TW: wx redelget used to collapse deltas
Hg: hg reci used to collapse change-sets
Discussion: In general, there should only be one when integrating, but in rare cases people will want changes to be tracked separately though integrated together. To allow for this, pulling from any untagged change-set below the top of the trunk is not guaranteed to work.

Integration

TW: putback
Hg: hg push
Discussion: These are similar, and both require that the changes are checked in to the child workspace.

SCCS keywords

Hg: there is no literal equivalent to SCCS keywords
See Meruciral Keyword Plan page for more information about this area of Mercurial.
See the 2007 Heads Up email for information about the removal of SCCS keywords in ON source code.
See the RTI nits page for specific instructions about putbacks to the ON consolidation.

Pointers to Other Information

Following are links that might be helpful for users transitioning from Teamware to Mercurial: