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Prefer mercurial to git

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Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#91

Post by mpyne »

cliffbean wrote: post #90
hawkharris wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It's worth noting that Git's hashes guard against accidental corruption; they aren't widely thought to be strong against attack by an intelligent adversary.

That's true, and AFAIK Linus says much the same. SHA1 is used for practical purposes and not security in the face of a determined attacker with cryptanalytic ability.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#92

Post by chimeracoder »

uid wrote: post #58
ehartsuyker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not even worth replying to, in my opinion.

I agree with this, so I hesitated to reply... BUT I feel it's important to point out one thing.

You're using the term "Open Source" (capitalized, even), which is a related ideology, but still distinct. It's jarring to read:

> If you don't support the latest views of the GNU committee and Dear Leader then you are against open source

when the FSF discourages use of the term "open source"[0]!

That said, you're right that this is all pretty silly factionalism. People love to focus on less important differences[1], while ignoring the more important larger picture.

Even the FSF doesn't consider "open source" (or the GPLv2) to be bad; they consider themselves both fighting for the same result, just with different motivations. As far as they are concerned, the GPLv2 is fine; the GPLv3 just happens to be a bit better.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm... (Don't be fooled by the title - the FSF views "Open Source" as an ally, not a rival).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#93

Post by Karunamon »

dllthomas wrote: post #68
Karunamon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't wash. It is quite possible to believe that the GNU project and what's associated with it (FSF) is a net positive while disagreeing with some of the actions of its founders or boosters, or some of their ideology. The GNU/FSF mindset is one of "You're either with us or against us" - but over here in the real world, things are not so black and white.

"That still doesn't wash. It is quite possible to believe that the GNU project and what's associated with it (FSF) is a net positive while disagreeing with some of the actions of its founders or boosters, or some of their ideology." A fair point. Picking licenses that explicitly forbid incorporation of your code in modern GNU projects is a little more than that, though. 'The GNU/FSF mindset is one of "You're either w…

I'd love to be proven wrong on this. Considering that their figurehead regards closed source software as unambiguously evil, I don't see many other ways to interpret their behvaior.

But:

>Picking licenses that explicitly forbid incorporation of your code in modern GNU projects

By GNU fiat and nothing more. Some of us would rather code than get involved in tiresome political disputes. (See also the BSD class of licenses)

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#94

Post by twic »

ufmace wrote: post #77
masklinn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where Mercurial falls short to me is that if you create a branch in your main repository like that, then it never goes away as far as I can tell. `bookmarks` will do that. Or you can use unnamed heads and track them manually[0] (that's essentially what bookmarks — and git branches — do). "Detached heads" are not a thing in mercurial, heads don't have to be named. [0] obviously there's nothing to track if you're jus…

I hadn't heard of that, and it does sound like a nice feature, but it still seems a little hacky compared to Git branches. At best, it would be as good as them, but then why not stick with the original? Oddly enough, I find myself liking the simplicity of Git here. You can do pretty complex stuff with it, but having only one type of branch seems to help some. That, and the local-only stashsets, which seem to be inten…

hg's equivalent of stash is shelve:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ShelveExtension

It does pretty much exactly the same thing.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#95

Post by harel »

sixthloginorso wrote: post #82

Why are people sweating small stuff like version control systems? How can you be a fanboy of a thing that keeps track of branches and patches. It's only incidentally related to Software development, you shouldn't feel as if a limb of yours was amputated if you \ gasp\ had to use a different one for another project. It's like using a different mail client or a different bug tracker; it doesn't affect what you can expr…

That's true, in a way, until someone tries to force CVS on you. Yes they are all sideline tools but once you get used to something, its the best thing in the world, until you get used to something else. Change is great, but not quite appreciated enough.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#96

Post by Pacabel »

schrodinger wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, at my company it is the oppositive. If you give the developers the choice, they would drop git and go back to mercurial.

Then why not switch to mercurial?

I don't know the specifics of his case, but there could be several reasons.

A likely one is that the benefits of a switch wouldn't outweigh the costs, at least not within a reasonable timeframe.

Another is that there may not be resources to dedicate to such an effort, even if the return would be suitable.

And yet another could be management buying into all of the git hype we've been subjected to a lot lately. Git (and GitHub) today are like Ruby on Rails was a few years back. Even though there are several alternatives, some of them much better in some ways, they just don't get the media attention, and thus don't get hyped, and thus don't get onto the radar of managers who decide which VCS to use, and thus don't see as much use, and thus aren't even seen as viable options by said managers.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#97

Post by twic »

ygra wrote: post #64
leobelle wrote: post #7

My 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…

As stated by the documentation, those numbers are purely a convenience feature for when you don't want to give the actual revision hash to a command. The latter is what you have to do in git anyway.

Exactly. Git has one way to refer to commits: hashes. Mercurial has two: hashes and revision numbers. If you don't like revision numbers, ignore them, and you're in exactly the same position as with Git.

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#98

Post by jebblue »

bjourne wrote: post #78
Karunamon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't wash. It is quite possible to believe that the GNU project and what's associated with it (FSF) is a net positive while disagreeing with some of the actions of its founders or boosters, or some of their ideology. The GNU/FSF mindset is one of "You're either with us or against us" - but over here in the real world, things are not so black and white.

> The GNU/FSF mindset is one of "You're either with us or against us" - but over here in the real world, things are not so black and white. That isn't in the least true. You should be very careful when trying to decode someones mindset because now you are putting words in someones mouth that never was there in the first place.

Well I Googl'ed:

  gnu  fsf "you're either with us or against us"
And it turns out that the idea shows up more than once. So it must be at least believed by some to be true.

That includes this interesting post on Slashdot from 2001:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/01/12/13/0242205/miguel...

In particular, a comment by ukryule seems especially applicable:

"Taken in the spirit intended. I accept that the GNU principles are quite clearly defined - but is it really the case that "you're either with us or against us"? The original post was asking about Ximian "abandoning it's GNU values" - to which I think pointing out the open-source work it is doing is a perfectly valid response (it shows that the company at least has common ground with GNU). To be fair, I don't know if Ximian (the company) ever supported GNU values ... but if they continue to spend say 80% of their time on GPL'd sw and the other 20% on prorietory sw does this imply they do or don't support GNU values? "

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#99

Post by twic »

leobelle wrote: post #7

My 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…

> you can't easily have local branches [2] > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8995598/can-i-mark-a-bran...

I don't get it. As a citation for your assertion that you can't easily have local branches, you link to a StackOverflow question for which the accepted answer explains how to easily have local branches.

What were you trying to say with that link?

Re: Prefer mercurial to git

#100

Post by mpyne »

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…

> The people who avoid the GPL3 do it because they do not share the goals of the GNU project.

Not necessarily true... it might simply be that they feel the goals of GNU are better pushed for via means other than GPLv3.

E.g. read a statement by Linux kernel devs regarding the second draft of GPLv3: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/22/217

Has nothing to do with not supporting the goals of GNU, and more to do with not introducing end use restrictions (which is a significant restraint on software freedom), the risk of balkanizing the FLOSS community (which has actually come true to some extent), etc.

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