What are the similarities and differences in functionality and project leadership between the two MercurialEclipse plugins that are currently (November 2012) available in the Eclipse Marketplace?
Just to expand on the question a bit:
I just want to use the working copy of a Mercurial project within Eclipse, but when I look for a Mercurial plugin I face this confusing choice. I suspect that for the moment it doesn’t matter very much which I use. But of course I don’t know that for certain.
At present (November 2012), there’s a MercurialEclipse listed among products on Intland Software’s web site, present in the Eclipse Marketplace as “MercurialEclipse (was: HgEclipse)”, with a home page at JavaForge.com. There’s another MercurialEclipse in the Eclipse Marketplace as “MercurialEclipse” that is more popular by downloads since August and that has a home page at BitBucket.org.
I see that there’s shared history, but at present, looking at JavaForge and BitBucket, they list different version numbers (1.9.1 and 2.0.1 respectively) and different Eclipse update sites. I see that the codebase has diverged and reunited before (http://andrei.gmxhome.de/mercurialeclipse/index.html). Do we now have two sites for two stages in the same line of development? Or is there perhaps a rivalry (whether intentional or unintentional) in which I’ll have to choose a side? In that case, does someone here have at hand the relevant information for choosing?
The short answer is they are the same with the Javaforge site lagging behind the Bitbucket site in releases. All bugs should be files on the Bitbucket site: https://bitbucket.org/mercurialeclipse/main
Originally MercurialEclipse was hosted on Bitbucket. Around the 1.5 release if I remember correctly Intland forked it to Javaforge. This is where the name HgEclipse originated. After some time the project reunited on Javaforge. Some time later just before the 2.0 release the project moved back to Bitbucket. There are a few reasons for moving back to bitbucket. One of them being that Intland did not do releases promptly and this caused confusion with users. Another reason is the JavaHg is hosted on Bitbucket and Bitbucket is otherwise a nice host.
Even though Intland has not directly contributed in a while I think they are still interested in hosting releases. Their update site includes Mercurial binaries whereas the Bitbucket one currently doesn’t.