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Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

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Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#21

Post by ValdikSS »

arp242 wrote: post #14
xeromal wrote: post #9

Github made hosting git free with private repos

Private repos were a paid plan on GitHub for a long time. Actually, a lot of people used GitHub for public stuff and BitBucket for private repos, because BitBucket did offer free private repos.

Yep, I still use it this way.

I believe that GitHub free for public only repo model is the reason why we have a lot of pet projects published, most of which were not really intended to be published to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#22

Post by jonathaneunice »

Network effects, powered by GitHub. Back in the day I loved Hg. Logical and rounded-edges where Git was geeky, tweaky, and rough. And the how many uses this vs. how many use that numbers were not so unequal. Tossup IIRC. But GitHub made Git easy to use as a team, collaborative and social, whereas Bitbucket made it easier but not with the same enthusiasm . Small advantages in user base size, branding, and ease of being supported "in the cloud" compounded over time, until suddenly using Mercurial seemed unusual and off the beaten path yet using Git felt natural and common. When supporting services (like CI/CD services) grew, it was clear who'd they support first. The market leader, natch. And so the momentum grew. Classic VHS vs Betamax.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#23

Post by brudgers »

1. Both tools are good enough. Source control is an engineering practice. Good enough is the core of engineering.

2. Source control was and is an expanding market. Beginners don't have the experience to make informed decisions about ergonomics and other nuances. More or less the features of git vs mercurial don't matter when a person adopts source control for the first time.

3. Ecosystems trump ergonomics...e.g. github. So does branding...i.e. the software Torvaldes wrote. And if I could make a bet, I'd bet Torvaldes writes software about as good as anyone on the Mercurial team, if not better.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#25

Post by metabro »

arp242 wrote: post #12
romanhn wrote: post #3

Facebook still uses Mercurial for their monorepo, as far as I know. I suspect GitHub is the reason git ultimately won. It became the easy default choice compared to the decision making involved with setting up local version control. For the record, last time I had to make that choice for my team pre-GitHub, I went with hg.

Is it still used at Facebook? I know they did in the past, but reading up a bit on the background on all of this I found https://github.com/facebook/sapling , and it seems that's what they're using now?

Yes they still use it but it’s meta’s version of it similar to presto and everything else.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#28

Post by nashashmi »

Mercurial didn’t have the evangelical base that GitHub gave git. Mercurial was hard to see in the real world. Mercurial was not taken up by the young programmers. Soon enough fewer young programmers meant more expensive development time because older more experienced programmers would be maintaining the code.

But I think the biggest reason mercurial did not do well was because the viral network was not there.

If hg wants to still be relevant, it should copy all of git’s commands and features and then supplement it with native features.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#29

Post by burnt-resistor »

romanhn wrote: post #3

Facebook still uses Mercurial for their monorepo, as far as I know. I suspect GitHub is the reason git ultimately won. It became the easy default choice compared to the decision making involved with setting up local version control. For the record, last time I had to make that choice for my team pre-GitHub, I went with hg.

It's (with arc and eden) aren't really anything like Mercurial anymore. It superficially resembles "hg" but it's a very hacked fork. It's more like sapling. https://sapling-scm.com

The legend has it that git folks didn't want to help scale mega monorepo support way back while hg folks did. Subsequently, Microsoft hired a git person who did add this functionality later such that modern git would work fine today.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(

#30

Post by gethly »

Github - it was a free hosting for your code which served also as your backup, as back then there were not many VCS hosting services and certainly none, or very few, that were free. Github changed how we approach VCS and code on a world scale.
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