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I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

mercurial-scm.org

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

#3

Post by jordigh »

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.

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. Some git users relied on cogito for another year or so, as simple things like `git-commit` still had to be manually handcrafted out of `git-commit-tree`.

I wasn't there to witness this, but I repeat it because it's actually kind of hard to dig up this history. I don't know of a single place that neatly chronicles the whole transition from bitkeeper -> git/mercurial.

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

#4

Post by billsix »

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.

Why is context needed when the first sentence is "Here it is 2016 and it's been almost 11 years since I started Mercurial." ?

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

#5

Post by mst »

billsix wrote: post #4
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.

Why is context needed when the first sentence is "Here it is 2016 and it's been almost 11 years since I started Mercurial." ?

I thought the same thing. Then I thought about some of the subthreads on the Sun2 bootloader article. Then I recalibrated my cynicism.

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

#6

Post by JoshTriplett »

jordigh wrote: post #3
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.

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. Some git users relied on cogito for another year or so, as simple things like `git-commit` still had to be manually handcrafted out of `git-commit-tree`. I wasn't there to witness this, but I repeat it because it's actual…

> 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 Mercurial for that reason, because they had developers on Windows.

Unfortunately, Mercurial took longer to develop some of its infrastructure, such as a repository structure optimized for performance, fast branches without making a separate working directory for each, and history editing capabilities. Today, as far as I know, Mercurial does have all of those things (some through plugins).

> Some git users relied on cogito for another year or so, as simple things like `git-commit` still had to be manually handcrafted out of `git-commit-tree`.

Many people (myself included) also used cogito as a crutch for a while longer, until really internalizing the value of the git index, because cogito defaulted to bypassing the index. I originally saw the index as an obstacle to the commit model I'd gotten used to from subversion. Today, I find it a critical part of git's culture of making small commits with one logical change each.

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

#7

Post by BuckRogers »

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.

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

#9

Post by klibertp »

billsix wrote: post #4
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.

Why is context needed when the first sentence is "Here it is 2016 and it's been almost 11 years since I started Mercurial." ?

I don't know the GP intention, but for people who first look through comments here, before investing time in reading the piece this is a crucial information. I wouldn't read the article if not for this post.
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