Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is git really far worse technology than mercurial? I’ve used both for years and to be honest they are pretty similar. What important capabilities does hg have that git does not? Maybe you can argue that hg is more ergonomic, but that’s just polish it doesn’t mean the tech is far better…
If you think about how much investment has gone into Git, whereas Mercurial has really been developed by a skeleton team, even the fact that they’re similar is indicative that Mercurial may have been better at its core. I haven’t touched mercurial in like 15 years, and from what I remember its UX was superior to what Git provides today. It had an extension system which I don’t remember the full capabilities of so I d…
Mercurial is more monolithic, and is based on python, writing an extension means writing a bit of python and telling Mercurial to integrate it.
Git is more like a loosely connected collection of commands working on the filesystem. It means that extending git is just creating an executable with a particular name in a particular directory. The executable can in turn call other commands, in particular the low level "plumbing", or even work directly with the files in .git.
They way they are similar is that they follow the same model: a decentralized system based on a DAG. And speaking of a "skeleton team", git was famously Linus Torvalds 2-week side project, and even though so much development has happened, providing tooling, convenience, performance, portability, etc... at its core, it never changed.