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Front Loaded Mercurial

I'm going to have to go back and see how I can avoid laying a big fat patch bomb on a repo and I'm not happy about it. There is no one to blame but myself. That doesn't make it any nicer. My big issue is that for all the cool features of Mercurial there is a consistent front loading requirement. You cannot simply work and then later construct your commits that you'll be pushing. MQ does help with this sort of thing and I'm going to have to find out just how much tomorrow, but it would have been really nice if I could have started coding and whan I finished have a convenient way to go through all the files and commit them in reasonable chunks.

The astute reader will recognize that this issue really just a sign of bad DVCS habits and I'm not about to argue otherwise. Still, I'm very much a part of the "not a great coder" club, and as such, seem like a good candidate for how to help out the normal developers using these powerful tools. One might also suggest that I open a ticket, or even better, contribute a patch. Again, my "not a great coder" club membership explicitly states that any gripes need to stay far away from those folks getting a lot of work done (a la the mercurial devs), hence I'm totally fine leaving my whining here on my blog. My bet is bringing it up here will do more to improve my own habits than suggesting to others they are real problems.

Next time I'm really going to do a better job manaing my patches. Feel free to hold my feet to the fire in the future seeing how I've done.

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