Thomas Capricelli

Unofficial mercurial mirror for Django that works

The documentation for Django mentions an “official” mirror for mercurial.

Django got us used to a very high standard when it comes to quality. Unfortunately, this is exactly the contrary for this mirror. It’s quite often broken, or not updated, or both.

The last itch is that nobody has taken care of it since the move form subversion to git. As a result, even though everything seems to work on the mirror, it’s actually frozen to the state previous the git move. Untouched for weeks that is, if not months.

That’s where you get to the second example of bad quality : I’ve tried reaching whoever is responsible for it, but it seems nobody is. Or nobody knows who this is. This might be someone from the Django communauty, or maybe it’s someone from bitbucket. Any way, none of those ever answered.

As a conclusion, it is broken, unmaintained, and nobody takes care of it.

So yet again, I’ve settled an unofficial mercurial mirror for Django. It is hosted on https://bitbucket.org/orzel/django, and is updated every 6 hours. Git branches are seen as heads on mercurial. You can also use bookmarks to bring your clone to a given branch, as, for example, “stable/1.4.x” for the 1.4.x branch.

As always, I’ll be the first user, so you can count on it being checked and maintained. If you got any problem with it, just hit the contact tab on this blog.

EDIT : see in comments, there’s another mirror setup by someone from bitbucket. Here are some thoughts about it.

No more ‘official’

As I understand it, it’s kind of ‘provided’ by bitbucket, but without any relation from the Django team. So that it’s not much official, and it explains, for example, why the wiki/documentation of Django was not updated, still is not (doesn’t even mention this mirror) and probably will not.

Not complete

The django/django-hg-git mirror doesn’t have any tag nor any bookmarks. A clone from this repository weight 109Mb on my hard disk, which is a lot less than the 172M if I clone from my own mirror. All of this makes me think that bitbucket’s mirror only actually mirrors the ‘main branch’ from the git repository.

Read-Write

It’s not mentionned on the ‘discussion’, but it might be that the mirror from bitbucket works in both direction. That is, developers can use this mirror when developping on Django. I’m not sure about this though.

What I’m sure about is that my mirror is NOT INTENDED for developers. It’s a READ-ONLY mirror and was meant to be so. I thought I had to clarify this point.

Conclusion

My main purpose is to follow stable branches on production servers (another blog entry is being written about those). As such, I will keep my own mirror for the time being.