Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:( • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by arp242 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

ValdikSS wrote: post #21

arp242 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GitHub has had unlimited free private repos for several years now. IIRC there is a limit on the number of collaborators you can add.

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

#32

Post by mesotron_dev » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

[dead]

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

#33

Post by kingkongjaffa » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 8:47 PM UTC

Is there a better tool for code review and issue management other than GitHub or gitlab?

Linear is one candidate but they don’t store your code.

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

#34

Post by 010101010101 » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

marklar423 wrote: post #17

I think Git was initially more popular and that had compounding effects that made it eclipse Mercurial. In 2010 or so we tried to adopt Mercurial at the small company I worked at, but the support for Git was just so much better - even back then. Git's popularity meant that tooling, documentation, and general ease of finding people to ask questions was 100x easier with Git, so we switched. I'd imagine the same thing p…

Circa ~2007/8 they were both very much on equal footing as far as popularity with individual engineers goes. The Linux kernel being on Git gave it an allure to most that Mercurial never had, but it was GitHub’s ascendancy that really started to put distance between the two.