What is a “commit”? (and what is Mercurial?)

Question

I posed it as a question, but my intention is to give the answer:

From time to time, whether the user has an Internet connection or not, PT writes an entry in the Project History: this is called a commit.

I believe it does it once every 24 hours, or immediately if more than 24 hours have elapsed since the last commit, and it was unable to do a commit at the 24-hour mark (e.g. computer was powered off or in sleep mode).

This means that if a user can’t Send/Receive for a number of days, there is still a daily record of the history of the changes that the user made.

(The term commit comes from the vocabulary associated with the underlying change-tracking module used by PT, which is a commercial product called Mercurial. Some associated apps and folders use the abbreviation “Hg”, since this is the chemical symbol for the metal mercury.)

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Developers, please correct any errors in the above.

Answer 1

Paratext also does commits at other times. For example, it does a commit before doing a global find/replace or other potentially-devastating operations. Also Paratext Live will create many commits while it is .

It might be more accurate to say that Paratext will make a commit at least once per day.

Comments

So if it does a commit because of Find&Replace, the next commit could be as much as 24 hours after that, correct?

Answer 2

Yes, that is correct.

Comments

So I was wondering whether commits can be set to be more frequent – whether that might help users to restore the text when unintended changes or deletions are made on work they’ve done in the last 24 hours, for example.

… Though I doubt it would have helped in the situation that inspired my post: a user said she’d lost three verses that she’d drafted earlier that day. Two hours earlier, she’d closed PT (I need to ask her why she did this!), and, by means of a self-confessed mental aberration, clicked No when PT asked if she wanted to save changes to the project.

I guess even the latest cloud-based apps wouldn’t get your lost work back in that situation, though it wouldn’t be rocket science to write code that would preserve it. In MS Word, if you start a new doc, never save it, then close it without saving, it keeps a copy: this is somewhat similar to what our user did.

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wdavidhj:

So I was wondering whether commits can be set to be more frequent

One way to handle this is to set a S/R schedule. If you choose every hour, then once a hour PT will show a notice asking you to do the S/R (and will do the commit). But if a user choose “No” when asked to save there isn’t much that PT can do.