Question

When working on multiple (open source) projects, multiple version controll systems start to be problematic. While they share common operations, I often make mistakes by typing hg add instead git add.

I remember seeing project some time ago that made access to different source control software in uniform way by providing basic commands commit/ci add etc. in shell. Depending on repository it would in turn call hg add or git add etc.

I’ve seen Amp: http://amp.carboni.ca/ (which seems to be down ATM) any other scripts like that?

Answer 1

I think unifications of two (in this case completely different) version control systems is not a sensible thing to attempt. While there are certain commonalities, the differences far outweigh the commonalities. More specifically, while you could map certain commands from one system to a similar command in another system, there will still be semantic differences because Mercurial and Git have completely different internal models. Just consider how branching is represented or git’s staging area.

Instead of trying to unify both systems at the “user” level, I think it is much more desirable to stick with one version control system and, if required, backport your changes/history to another system using a bridge (similar to git-svn).

Typing hg add vs. git add is not something that can get really dangerous if your current directory is not a repository managed in both systems, so you’ll get a meaningful error message.