I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#21

Post by amadvance » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #16

nailer wrote: post #13

hg could be 20% better than git. For the sake of the arugment, let's say it is. git's network effects mean hg needs to be 1000% better than git to replace it (much like git replaced svn, svn replaced cvs, and cvs replaced rcs).

There are tons of companies using mercurial including some of the biggest ones. It's not really accurate to imply that Git won and Mercurial is dead.

I consider the CPython switch from Mercurial to git the final declaration of victory.

I still have to understand how CPython could miss the symbolic meaning of this decision.

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#22

Post by oblio » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:28 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #12

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lest we forget, Mercurial was offered as the other solution to the Bitkeeper problem, as mpm was a kernel hacker at the time. It got a usable UI at version 0.1, two weeks after the git announcement. I remember using Mercurial very early on in its lifetime, during my first internship at IBM, because Xen used it. Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Me…

> Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Mercurial for that reason, because they had developers on Windows. Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions. In my own case, I really preferred hg's command congruence to SVN; git's deceptive similarity took a long time to get over. > I originally saw the index as an o…

> Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions.

That's quite dismissive of Windows...

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#23

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

I loved Mercurial, but just like with Wirth languages, I seem be on the wrong side of the mainstream flow.

Thanks for Mercurial!

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#24

Post by theandrewbailey » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #2

For context here, and for people like me who don't follow the development of Mercurial closely enough to realize, mpm is not just some random contributor to Mercurial, but is in fact Matt Mackall, the original author of Mercurial.

Thanks for the clarification. Initially, I was thinking mpm was another package manager.

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#25

Post by pcwalton » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #12

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lest we forget, Mercurial was offered as the other solution to the Bitkeeper problem, as mpm was a kernel hacker at the time. It got a usable UI at version 0.1, two weeks after the git announcement. I remember using Mercurial very early on in its lifetime, during my first internship at IBM, because Xen used it. Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Me…

> Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Mercurial for that reason, because they had developers on Windows. Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions. In my own case, I really preferred hg's command congruence to SVN; git's deceptive similarity took a long time to get over. > I originally saw the index as an o…

> Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions.

I didn't see any indication in the parent comment (or in general, really) that Windows support was the cause of Mercurial's difficulty in implementing those features.

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#26

Post by masklinn » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

BuckRogers wrote: post #7

Matt has done a great job and I wish hg had taken off more than it did, though it would be disingenuous to suggest it hasn't been successful. I used hg before moving to git and always preferred the clean, single language implementation vs the scripts and general hackish nature that git offered as an alternative. As a result, it was a nice perk for a long time that hg worked much better than git on Windows.

Also the revsets, while they're relatively recent in the grand scheme of things (hg 1.6 circa 2010) I so miss these when I have to use (or even read the man page of) the garbage fire that is `git log` (templates also help)

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#27

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #19

School-Cotton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of companies using mercurial including some of the biggest ones. It's not really accurate to imply that Git won and Mercurial is dead.

Yes, For instance, Java.

Facebook is another example :)

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#28

Post by theandrewbailey » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #12

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lest we forget, Mercurial was offered as the other solution to the Bitkeeper problem, as mpm was a kernel hacker at the time. It got a usable UI at version 0.1, two weeks after the git announcement. I remember using Mercurial very early on in its lifetime, during my first internship at IBM, because Xen used it. Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Me…

> Mercurial also ran on Windows far, far earlier than Git did. A few projects (notably Mozilla) selected Mercurial for that reason, because they had developers on Windows. Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions. In my own case, I really preferred hg's command congruence to SVN; git's deceptive similarity took a long time to get over. > I originally saw the index as an o…

> Ouch, yet another way in which running on Windows can lead to poor technical decisions.

I've never heard from anyone that choosing/using Mercurial was a poor decision. Are you biased?

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#29

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #13

hg could be 20% better than git. For the sake of the arugment, let's say it is. git's network effects mean hg needs to be 1000% better than git to replace it (much like git replaced svn, svn replaced cvs, and cvs replaced rcs).

Yeah by "git's network effects" you mean github. If github had decided to be hghub instead, hg would probably have won.

Re: I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

#30

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

amadvance wrote: post #21

School-Cotton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of companies using mercurial including some of the biggest ones. It's not really accurate to imply that Git won and Mercurial is dead.

I consider the CPython switch from Mercurial to git the final declaration of victory. I still have to understand how CPython could miss the symbolic meaning of this decision.

It's probably more accurate to say they switched to github, but yes.