Hi, everyone.

I'd like to ask Gentoo repository owners to switch off Mercurial
and remove all Mercurial repositories from repositories.xml.  There are
two reasons for that:

1. Portage does not support syncing from Mercurial repos, and needs to
use external tools (e.g. layman) for that.

2. Mercurial is buggy and maintaining support for those repos is PITA.

If you noticed that Gentoo repository mirrors did not update for 10
hours a few days ago -- Mercurial was the reason.  It is very fragile,
and if some server chokes during sync, it hangs the whole process until
somebody (which means me) kills it.  And it's not the first time it
killed the whole system.

Yes, I could add process timeouts.  But small timeouts are going to
break the occasional necessity of cloning big repos, and big timeouts
are going to make little difference when Mercurial starts hanging again.

If someone really cares about this horrible piece of software, I'd
appreciate patches (preferably going upstream) to make it timeout sanely
when something hangs.  Otherwise, I'd like to announce discontinuation
of Mercurial support soon.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny