[CityGen] Google Code Cloning

[Jim]

Google Code now allows cloning mercurial projects. This affords a better way of working collaboratively on a project. It gives the project owner a choice of which changes to merge instead of allowing everyone to push their changes on everyone else. (I never felt 100% comfortable pushing to someone else's repository.) Also, the owner can come back to the contributor and say "make these changes and we'll talk."

For example, if I want to contribute to CityGen, I can create my own online clone of the project. I can then clone that locally and add/test my features. I then push back to my online repo. At this point, Thom is able to review my changes and decide if they are worthy of merging into his main repo.

It also allows module writers a way to write and test modules without them necessarily needing merged into the main line of development.

Off-topic:

Both github and bitbucket have had this feature available for a long time; but since citygen is hosted on Google Code, I thought I'd make folks aware it is an option there also.

Also off-topic: It seems like the best option for collaborating using a scm would be:

Host the project on github. Since there is a mercurial plugin (hg-git) that allows hg to be used to manage a git repository, it would allow git and hg users the chance to contribute.

[Jim]

After a little more playing around it seems Google Code lacks ability to do a online pull request back to the original repository. So in order to merge changes from a cloned repo, you need to clone it locally on your computer, merge and then push back to main. Which amounts to just a few extra steps.