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Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

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Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#21

Post by juvoly »

tasuki wrote: post #17
juvoly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercurial wasn't as simple as Subversion. But with hg I still felt like understanding 80% of what the tool had to offer and actually being able to mold the timeline the way I wanted. Git has so many gotchas, bells and whistles that whenever I'm doing something out of the ordinary I'm wondering if there isn't an easier / canonical / smarter way I should be doing it.

> Mercurial wasn't as simple as Subversion. What? Subversion is by far the most complex versioning software I've ever used. > Git has so many gotchas, bells and whistles The Git UI leaves a little to be desired. But inside, Git is basically just blobs, trees, commits, and refs. It'd be hard (or impossible?) to find a conceptually simpler versioning system.

You're right about SVN's guts vs Git. I should have been clearer that I was referring to the client cli only.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#22

Post by tempest_ »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #10

Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial. I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and pe…

Our company also made this choice.

One of the first things I did was switch us to git.

Mercurial was way easier to use and fit our use case but all the tooling was built for git.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#23

Post by ssttoo »

IIRC Facebook switched to HG from SVN in the 2010s, one (main?) motivator being that the single repo was getting too big and svn’s only way was to start splitting it up. Which was against the philosophy of openness of the single repo. No idea what’s Meta doing now.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#24

Post by amluto »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #10

Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial. I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and pe…

I also did this. Both in hindsight and at the time, I thought Mercurial had far better tooling. But it was not all amazing: Mercurial’s branching model was very poor, and its sequentially numbered revision system was and remains a very bad design.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#25

Post by zabzonk »

Pay08 wrote: post #11
zabzonk wrote: post #7

I loved Mercurial - still do I guess as I just installed it on the Linux Mint VM I keep around for messing with Linux. The thing I really liked about it was TortoiseHg, which provides integration between Mercurial and Windows Explorer. There is a similar TortoiseGit but, at least back when I was doing serious development, it had quite a few problems.

FWIW, as a recent user of TortoiseGit, it seems pretty decent nowadays.

That's what I expected - I was sure the Tortoise guys would get it right eventually.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#26

Post by throwaway894345 »

Pay08 wrote: post #12
throwaway894345 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly hg shot themselves in the foot by not releasing any stable API and making developers use their CLI interface. Between that and the performance and dynamic typing issues of Python, it was almost sure to lose the race to Git.

Git doesn't have any sort of API either, libgit2 is unofficial.

Git's filesystem layout has always been stable and Git encouraged developers to target it. Mercurial strongly cautioned developers away from its filesystem or source code APIs and told them to subprocess out to the CLI. To be clear, I dislike Git, but it was _designed_ with developers in mind (which isn't to say that it has a nice API, only that the Git people intended for Git to be extended). I prefer Mercurial's concepts and interface, but Mercurial was somewhere between indifferent and hostile toward developers.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#27

Post by justsomehnguy »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #10

Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial. I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and pe…

You did the right at the right time, you wasn't some prescient being. Why are you

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#28

Post by locknitpicker »

amluto wrote: post #24
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #10

Almost 20 years ago I helped our company choose between Git and Mercurial as the replacement for Subversion. Unfortunately, I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial. I say wrong because clearly Git won the war and I haven't used Mercurial since then. However, I still think I made the right choice from a technical perspective; I thought Mercurial was way more user-friendly while providing all the features and pe…

I also did this. Both in hindsight and at the time, I thought Mercurial had far better tooling. But it was not all amazing: Mercurial’s branching model was very poor, and its sequentially numbered revision system was and remains a very bad design.

> I also did this. Both in hindsight and at the time, I thought Mercurial had far better tooling.

I recall checking Mercurial back in the day and being puzzled by the lack of basic features such as the ability to stash changes. I also recalled that the community was dismissive of the lack of such a basic feature, with comments such as users could always create local branches, of even we could perhaps install a module such as shelve.

That was the image that Mercurial left with me with regards to git: missing critical features and not bothering to bridge the gap.

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#29

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #26
Pay08 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git doesn't have any sort of API either, libgit2 is unofficial.

Git's filesystem layout has always been stable and Git encouraged developers to target it. Mercurial strongly cautioned developers away from its filesystem or source code APIs and told them to subprocess out to the CLI. To be clear, I dislike Git, but it was _designed_ with developers in mind (which isn't to say that it has a nice API, only that the Git people intended for Git to be extended). I prefer Mercurial's co…

[deleted]

Re: Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]

#30

Post by Shish2k »

ssttoo wrote: post #23

IIRC Facebook switched to HG from SVN in the 2010s, one (main?) motivator being that the single repo was getting too big and svn’s only way was to start splitting it up. Which was against the philosophy of openness of the single repo. No idea what’s Meta doing now.

Last I checked (2 years ago) Meta was using Sapling, a very heavily customised open source Mercurial frontend with proprietary backend.

FWIW the Sapling frontend can also be connected to a Git backend, and I've been using that for all my open source projects to get the best of Mercurial's user experience niceness while collaborating via GitHub <3

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