Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might as well jump in on this, too...
nice
Is this the thread where Mozillians assemble?
I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
191–200 of 250 posts
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mercurial also missed the window on performance and safety. If you started using it around 2009 or so, Hg was notably slower for daily use and a lot of people recommended using extensions to match Git features but those extensions were not stable (Hg and RCS are the only VCSes I’ve seen require data to be recovered from a backup due to normal usage). There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating…
That's not a meme, many git commands have switches which make them behave wildly differently creating massive confusion.
Newer versions have improved greatly in that regard, but sure you still find too many tutorials etc. using git checkout for everything.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#193I don't understand why so many people seem to dislike git. But maybe in actuality it is not many people, as usually people who are discontent are the loudest. I used Mercurial in the past for a bit, and it was fine. But for me it doesn't seem to have any huge advantages over git, if any. And after so many years of experience using git, I know what workflows work well, how to resolve merge conflicts, how to revert to…
Git functionality is great. But the CLI just kind of grew in a nonsensical way. No serious effort seems to have been made on UX consistency and verb/noun names. People who've been using it for years don't notice, they don't even think about it. But when coming from scratch, it's anything but intuitive. The CLI is not discoverable in a reasonable way. That and there's so many ways to use it. Mercurial had the advantag…
Please have a look at newer commands like restore, switch etc. Much clearer in my regard.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#194I don't understand why so many people seem to dislike git. But maybe in actuality it is not many people, as usually people who are discontent are the loudest. I used Mercurial in the past for a bit, and it was fine. But for me it doesn't seem to have any huge advantages over git, if any. And after so many years of experience using git, I know what workflows work well, how to resolve merge conflicts, how to revert to…
I could go into some detail here why Git is the harder to use system of the two, but I think that would miss the bigger point.
IMO, the larger and longer-term problem is that (open source) version control systems seem to be mostly stuck in the early aughts. This may sound provocative, but in principle, Git and Mercurial don't offer much that wasn't already part of Monotone. Meta/Facebook has really been the only actor I am aware of who has been really pushing the envelope in terms of making open source version control more convenient.
If you think I'm being needlessly provocative, just consider this simple example: why don't version control systems (especially ones that can change history) have undo/redo functionality out of the box? I've only seen this as a Facebook extension for Mercurial that never made it into the Mercurial proper (and survived only as part of Sapling).
This is an essential feature of every basic editor nowadays and it is not easy to implement for a VCS, but it's still mind-boggling that after nearly two decades, it isn't considered core functionality of a VCS. Recovering from mistakes remains a pain point in pretty much any VCS, but shouldn't be.
Commit graph visualization is another problem that's just not handled very well by either Git or Mercurial and hasn't really improved much since their early incarnations, if at all. "git log --graph" or "hg log -G" don't really produce output fit for human consumption if you have even a moderately complex branch structure.
Version control systems are still generally very low-level, giving you a lot of primitives and very few high-level operations that aim at making complex workflows less complex.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#195I kind of like Fossil nowadays, although I'm not entirely on par with their philosophy of not squashing branches. But the "all-in-one" aspect, together with "one binary" is pretty nice.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Essentially, the problem with git is - it is a tool that is simple in its internals, but with a complex/confusing UI. The only way for someone to feel somewhat in comfortable with git is to have a good conceptual model for how it works internally. Once you have that mental model, you feel like a magician with git, but for beginners, it is a source of endless confusion and fear.
GIT is a tool. Like a swiss army knife, it looks tricky and you need some experience to master all what it provides. But you never actually need everything and, surely, you should also shy away from features if you do not really need them. In this respect GIT is a bit like Perl or C++. You have to apply some discipline to avoid unnecessary complexity. Personally, I have never used GIT's "octopus" merge support but I…
Although I understand all these commands and can use them, it's a typical Linux tool.
Sure, if you understand the internals you can use the tools and the horrendous GUIs that are nothing more than a thin layer of paint.
But a truly user-centric tool would actually help you with something like
"I want to work on a new Feature A" "I want to continue working on Feature B" "I want my changes in the software/product" "I want to review a pull request (haha!) locally, in order to have IDE support." "I did an oopsie and need to go back."
Imagine navigating to a website by specifing its hash, or seeing changes to a PowerPoint file using "git status" and seeing "++slide1.pp". It would be terrible.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything that was different to what he was used to he hated. I suspect he just hated the constant churn. That's kind of a rational frame of mind when you think about it.
I enjoy learning new things, but my bar for "is this actually better?" seems to be unconsciously higher than it used to be.
Mine too. I suspect it's the classic explore/exploit dilemma. We've learned enough that every new hotness just doesn't seem that novel or worth the effort to learn given we already see a path to our goals using what we already know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilem...
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mercurial also missed the window on performance and safety. If you started using it around 2009 or so, Hg was notably slower for daily use and a lot of people recommended using extensions to match Git features but those extensions were not stable (Hg and RCS are the only VCSes I’ve seen require data to be recovered from a backup due to normal usage). There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating…
> There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all, distributed version control, and any specific tool That may be the case for some people, but far from all. Many people who started with cvs or even rcs and have moved on to the newer things as they have appeared still find got annoying and unintuitive. Especially compared to Mercurial. You us…
My experience was comparing multople people who started with Mercurial and later learned Git, and had basically all of what people term “Git problems” with Hg because the hard part was thinking about distributed version control.
I’m not saying Git is perfect but simply that it’s hard to separate the difficulties from learning new concepts and working styles from the tool.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#199Switching to Git makes sense, but choosing GitHub is diametrically opposed to what Mozilla claim their principles are — specifically principle 6 of the Mozilla Manifesto: “The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralised participation worldwide.”
=> https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/about/manifesto/
In future it won't be possible to contribute to Firefox without a Microsoft account. If Microsoft decide to close your account (which they're entitled to do — they own the website), you can't participate.
Mozilla were one of the few hold-outs against this particular attempted monopoly. Again, Mozilla makes a short-termist decision that makes sense for a Silicon Valley lifestyle brand, but makes no sense for an independent mission-driven public-service community project.
They're an untrustworthy upstream.
Re: I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mercurial also missed the window on performance and safety. If you started using it around 2009 or so, Hg was notably slower for daily use and a lot of people recommended using extensions to match Git features but those extensions were not stable (Hg and RCS are the only VCSes I’ve seen require data to be recovered from a backup due to normal usage). There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating…
That's not a meme, many git commands have switches which make them behave wildly differently creating massive confusion.
Sure, but most of those are things you rarely need and it’s not like Mercurial was an AI which always knew what you meant - anyone who ever tried to explain merge-queues to someone else knows that some concepts are just harder than others.