Back in the day it was git vs mercurial -- with Mercurial having obviously better ergonomics. So why did Mercurial die, and is anyone still using it today for their day to day?
Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#2Computing is a winner-take-all industry.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#3Facebook 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#4Personally I went from subversion to git. never really made the mercurial stop.
For me, I keep branching super simple, but that was the big one for people. Git branching was far superior to mercurial.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#5Facebook 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.
Agreed, I think GitHub was pretty much the critical feature... and happened to come along at a time when SourceForge was widely disliked and people didn't trust some of the other offerings from Google, MS, etc in the open source world nearly as much. GitHub added a social aspect to open-source development that other sites simply didn't have at the time.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#6GitHub made git popular, and git made GitHub popular.
So the major mercurial hosts (especially bucket) decided that it wasn't worth supporting even for their existing users. That was the mail in Mercurial's coffin. Google also decided to shut down their Google Code.
Git's appeal is that it is more flexible and has every feature you might want, allowing people to do whatever they wish whether it's pretty or not. As long as it works, people can look past the ergonomics. GUIs and AI shield most people from the UI.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#7GitHub made git popular, and git made GitHub popular. So the major mercurial hosts (especially bucket) decided that it wasn't worth supporting even for their existing users. That was the mail in Mercurial's coffin. Google also decided to shut down their Google Code. Git's appeal is that it is more flexible and has every feature you might want, allowing people to do whatever they wish whether it's pretty or not. As lo…
> GitHub made git popular, and git made GitHub popular
The free plan made GitHub popula, not git
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#8Github was part of it. The other part was Linus being the author of Git and putting his weight behind it. It wasn't for technical reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#9Github made hosting git free with private repos
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:(
#10Mozilla still uses Mercurial for Firefox development [0]. They're in the process of moving to git and GitHub [1]. I don't know the status of the move, but I contributed a bit to Firefox's build system via Mercurial, and I am glad to see they're moving to git since it's the industry standard. Mercurial felt so alien when I was using it. Git has its own share of UX problems, but finding support for Mercurial was much harder for me, precisely because nobody really uses it anymore.
References:
0: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/
1: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/Qnfy...