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Prefer mercurial to git

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Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#51

Post by username223 »

nailer wrote: post #2

Context? 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.

Context matters here. Emacs uses bzr because it is an official Gnu project, but it's buggy and increasingly unmaintained, so there are reasons to switch. Jordi seems to have some personal thing against Git, while ESR favors Git but is bad at interacting with humans. It's standard mailing list politics, with technical considerations irrelevant; IMHO the two most likely outcomes are sticking with Bzr and moving to Git, depending on how much ESR manages to piss people off.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#53

Post by blibble »

spellboots wrote: post #3

I 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…

git is as prone to bitrot as hg.

git doesn't run fsck on the entire repo for each operation, and unless you fsck or clone you won't detect corruption for quite a while.

it's exactly the same for hg, which is built on the same hashing concept as git (actually the other way round, as hg came first).

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#54

Post by Karunamon »

copx wrote: post #44
Karunamon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>while Git is made by anti-GNU people who do not believe in free software and has an incompatible license. WTF? Git is GPLv2 - the exact same as the Linux kernel. A great many developers are avoiding v3 due to the changes it made. And "anti-GNU people" is just a lame insult.

The people who avoid the GPL3 do it because they do not share the goals of the GNU project. The GPL3 expresses the same philosophy as the GPL2. GNU released a new version only because companies discovered a loophole (a bug if you will) in the GPL which allowed them to build non-free (as in GNU) systems based on GPL software. GNU was founded to fight such systems. However, Linus Torvalds (Linux and git) has no problem…

Not agreeing with the FSF's rather dogmatic stances does not make you "anti-free-software". Having no problem with closed source does not make you "anti-free-software".

(Except in the eyes of zealots, but who cares about them?)

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#55

Post by wes-exp »

copx wrote: post #6

You 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.

Quite frankly, not sharing GNU's goals is a feature, not a bug. The less the source code is encumbered by onerous political restrictions, the better.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#56

Post by nousernamesleft »

Karunamon wrote: post #24
copx wrote: post #6

You 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.

>while Git is made by anti-GNU people who do not believe in free software and has an incompatible license. WTF? Git is GPLv2 - the exact same as the Linux kernel. A great many developers are avoiding v3 due to the changes it made. And "anti-GNU people" is just a lame insult.

>And "anti-GNU people" is just a lame insult

It is an insult? Like "people with common sense" or "individuals of sound mind"?

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#57

Post by jordigh »

Karunamon wrote: post #24
copx wrote: post #6

You 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.

>while Git is made by anti-GNU people who do not believe in free software and has an incompatible license. WTF? Git is GPLv2 - the exact same as the Linux kernel. A great many developers are avoiding v3 due to the changes it made. And "anti-GNU people" is just a lame insult.

> And "anti-GNU people" is just a lame insult.

My point was that in the context of Emacs, arguably the GNUest of the GNU, being anti-GNU is nothing to scoff at. Indeed, bzr was chosen for a long time because it was an official GNU project and was usable enough.

The hg devs went through great pains to change the license from GPLv2 to GPLv2-or-later. Lead dev Matt Mackall calls himself a free software advocate (not open source) is good friends with the likes of Bradley Kuhn and Eben Moglen of Software Freedom Conservancy and the Software Freedom Law Center respectively, and makes a point about defending Mercurial's copyleft. Ideology being important for GNU Emacs, it also seemed important to me to argue in favour of Mercurial on these grounds.

That Mercurial also happens to be fast, featureful, innovative, and generally kickass is a nice cherry on top. Its only significant drawback is that it's not as popular as git.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#58

Post by uid »

ehartsuyker wrote: post #20
Codhisattva wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Tl;dr: is wrong.

For those of us less aware, could your or copx link to an explanation or why the tl;dr is or isn't wrong, or give us a quick one?

Petty factionalism within Open Source where if you don't support the latest views of the GNU committee and Dear Leader then you are against open source (which is ridiculous). Largest dispute has been a lot of GPL projects that won't move to v3 since there are a lot of problems with it.

Not even worth replying to, in my opinion.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#59

Post by masklinn »

zobzu wrote: post #36

I use Git and Mercurial daily. They're both ok. However.. I prefer Git to mercurial, mainly because: - Git is noticeably faster for all operations (yeah, specially if you don't use GitHub for pull/push as they're slow as hell ;-) - Git has sensible default settings, for example, git log is easier than hg log|less. Similarly, git show HEAD^ is easier than hg log --patch --rev tip. (Both are easier to remember, type, a…

> Git has sensible default settings, for example, git log is easier than hg log|less.

    cat >> ~/.hgrc
    [pager]
    pager = less -FRX
    [extensions]
    pager=
There, I fixed it.

> Similarly, git show HEAD^ is easier than hg log --patch --rev tip

Wait, what? Those commands do completely different things. What are you trying to do?

Furthermore, the assertion that `git show` is "easier" than `hg log` seems odd on its face, why is it easier to have two different commands to see the same thing, with the only difference being the length of the revision set? (yes I know `git show` can also show other objects, but that's now how you used it here).

> Want to make a test branch and play around? git branch blahtest and play. With hg, you have to use queues

Uh… no. You can create a bookmark, or just commit stuff (hg has no prohibition against what git calls "detached heads", they're just anonymous branches).

You have to use MQ if you want to do quilt-type things. Used to be you also had to use it if you wanted to perform extensive history-rewriting, but that hasn't been the case for a few years now.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#60

Post by asveikau »

_delirium wrote: post #33
frik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summary of main arguments: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso: [...] main argument in favour of hg is not technical, but rather social. For GNU, I think it is far more important to support a project that aligns with GNU's aims [...] GPL2+ Reply by Eric S. Raymond: +1. And I say that as someone who *likes* hg and wishes it had won. Repeating the bzr mistake would be stupid, stupid, *stupid*. Edit: Raymond replied to Kastrup who…

That's not an accurate summary of the main arguments. For one thing, on the pro-hg side you've quoted only the opinion of someone (Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso) who isn't even an emacs dev: the email starts with a note to please cc him on replies because he isn't subscribed to the list! This isn't the view of the GNU project, the opinion of the Emacs developers on why they prefer hg over git, or even the personal view of…

I don't know why people quote ESR like that's still a thing either. He wrote some essays in the 90s, wrote some possibly important code before that time, but one must understand his position on this list is basically troll.
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