Prefer mercurial to git
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Prefer mercurial to git
1–10 of 189 posts
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#2Context? This just seems to be a post from a Mercurial/Hg advocate.
Mercurial could be 10% better than git, but unless it's 500% better, it will never displace it.
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#3I was forced to use mercurial for a few years at work and I really hated it. Sure it has a better learning curve than git (or did) but I found it to be incredibly frustrating already knowing git.
In addition, I found it to be slower, less flexible, and prone to permanent repository corruption - yes, in git you do see repo corruption but because of the cryptographic nature of git objects you know immediately. HG will (did?) happily let you work away at a corrupted repo for weeks until a fresh clone was attempted and the dreaded repo corrupted message killed development for days until the problem was painstakingly manually fixed.
This is just personal experience and a lot of it comes down to taste, but IMO if you are already proficient with git there is absolutely nothing about mercurial that is preferable and some considerable downsides I have been subjected to.
Disclaimer: This was a few years ago now, perhaps the project is more mature than it was.
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#4Context? This just seems to be a post from a Mercurial/Hg advocate. Mercurial could be 10% better than git, but unless it's 500% better, it will never displace it.
emacs is moving off of bzr.
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#5I was forced to use mercurial for a few years at work and I really hated it. Sure it has a better learning curve than git (or did) but I found it to be incredibly frustrating already knowing git. In addition, I found it to be slower, less flexible, and prone to permanent repository corruption - yes, in git you do see repo corruption but because of the cryptographic nature of git objects you know immediately. HG will…
I'm interested in your comment about the cryptographic nature of git objects. I know that hashes are used to identify commits, but I'm not sure how Git uses cryptography elsewhere — e.g. to check the integrity of repos, as you said. Can you explain this aspect in more detail? (Not being argumentative; just curious.)
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#6You should have linked the first post in that thread. It explains what the whole thing is actually about:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00...
Tl;dr: Mercurial is a free software project sharing GNU's goals, while Git is made by anti-GNU people who do not believe in free software and has an incompatible license.
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#7My biggest issues with hg are that hg's revision numbers aren't synchronized across instances, they are local only[1] making them kind of useless, you can't easily have local branches[2], and it stores changesets instead of objects.
I've ever seen a convincing argument to choose hg over git. Sure you can do a lot of things with it and I'm sure it's perfectly fine to use, but if you know git, and you like git, there's no reason to switch. What does hg have that makes it better than git that you should give up git? Popularity is what git has over hg. Someone using git will probably never have to spend anytime worrying about learning hg, but an hg user will have to become familiar with git because git is used everywhere nowadays. So my recommendation to people new to versioning systems is to pick git. I can't for the life of me understand why someone would pick hg for an open source project unless they wanted to throw learning curves and barriers at developers, or they just really really liked hg (probably because they chose it over git a long time ago).
[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RevisionNumber
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8995598/can-i-mark-a-bran...
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#8You should have linked the first post in that thread. It explains what the whole thing is actually about: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00... Tl;dr: Mercurial is a free software project sharing GNU's goals, while Git is made by anti-GNU people who do not believe in free software and has an incompatible license.
Not even RMS holds that position. You should read the thread.
Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#9Re: Prefer mercurial to git
#10I was forced to use mercurial for a few years at work and I really hated it. Sure it has a better learning curve than git (or did) but I found it to be incredibly frustrating already knowing git. In addition, I found it to be slower, less flexible, and prone to permanent repository corruption - yes, in git you do see repo corruption but because of the cryptographic nature of git objects you know immediately. HG will…
Funny, at my company it is the oppositive.
If you give the developers the choice, they would drop git and go back to mercurial.