hg advent -m '04: there is no index'

This one will be really really short. I didn’t get a chance to hop into #mercurial and try to debug hg-git.

So instead here’s a very initial observation from using mercurial on a toy repo: there is no index / staging area. Instead, everything that’s changed in the working directory will be committed.

This reminds me of part of hg help revsets that I didn’t quote yesterday:

The reserved name “.” indicates the working directory parent. If no working directory is checked out, it is equivalent to null. If an uncommitted merge is in progress, “.” is the revision of the first parent.

There’s no room for a staging area concept like the index if the working directory has a parent: it means that the working directory is the in-progress changeset that will be created by hg commit. In git, that in-progress commit is what is stored in the index. and conceptually HEAD is its parent.

The reason this small observation gets it’s own post is that it’s going to require a mental shift in how I VCS. A huge amount of my workflow involves git add --patch¹. A quick google suggests that you can achieve similar things via hg commit --interactive (formerly hg record, an extension!), which is a relief. But it still feels conceptually different to me.

That’s all I have for today!