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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]

#31

Post by 3form »

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'm glad that I stuck to git for a similar reason; it won the war. And I understand the need for simpler tools.

But to offer a point I haven't heard from anyone before: at least I feel that I am done with it, I learned this tool sufficiently and I can move on with my life. From time to time I add something to my git toolbelt. I feel if Mercurial or anything else have won, I would maybe have to learn another tool in 5 years, whatever else got popular, and another in next 5 years. But now I have everything I need in git, and always have needed. I hold some hope in it that perhaps the learning curve was worth it.

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

#32

Post by delecti »

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.

I found that doing anything even slightly unusual in Git was pretty incomprehensible until I learned its internals, and pretty easy once I did. Fortunately as you say the internals are conceptually pretty simple to learn.

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

#33

Post by rileymat2 »

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 think I liked the Mercurial branching model better than git, due to the branches being a first class record of events. What I did not know is how common the git rebase/clean linear history would become or a desire to change history on merge.

Mercurial had bookmarks that were roughly the same as git branches.

The linear version numbers were quite useful to reason about and use in places that call for a "number" version number, and were useful relative to your "master" clone. That was not the primary way though, it had hashes like git too, that were the same from clone to clone.

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

#34

Post by marcher »

locknitpicker wrote: post #28
amluto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It did have a kind of equivalent to stashes in the mq extension, but its interface was a bit esoteric compared to the rest of Hg, from what I remember.

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

#35

Post by qwery »

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 don't think Git winning a popularity contest is a reason for choosing Mercurial to have been wrong, or unfortunate. Was there some negative consequence from the decision -- either directly from Mercurial itself, or just because over time everyone expected Git, perhaps?

(Hopefully this comes across as curious, which it is, and not antagonistic, which its not)

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

#36

Post by ern »

rileymat2 wrote: post #33
amluto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think I liked the Mercurial branching model better than git, due to the branches being a first class record of events. What I did not know is how common the git rebase/clean linear history would become or a desire to change history on merge. Mercurial had bookmarks that were roughly the same as git branches. The linear version numbers were quite useful to reason about and use in places that call for a "number" vers…

The clean linear history thing is something I never really got, despite using git for 12 years now. I worked with some smart developers whose rule was "rebase if you want, but if too complicated, just merge", and it didn't hurt the delivery or maintainability of the code they wrote.

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

#37

Post by voidnap »

marcher wrote: post #34
locknitpicker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It did have a kind of equivalent to stashes in the mq extension, but its interface was a bit esoteric compared to the rest of Hg, from what I remember.

A lot of features that git had by default had to be enabled as plugins in mercurial.

The plugins were usually shipped with mercurial so you didn't have to install them separately, but you needed to know that you had to enable them in a config. And I beleive this turned a lot of people off.

I think some of the extensions were very basic stuff like graph logging and colorized output -- and mq like you said. So it was kind of unfortunate that people got a bad impression of hg from that and bounced off.

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

#38

Post by MBCook »

3form wrote: post #31
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'm glad that I stuck to git for a similar reason; it won the war. And I understand the need for simpler tools. But to offer a point I haven't heard from anyone before: at least I feel that I am done with it, I learned this tool sufficiently and I can move on with my life. From time to time I add something to my git toolbelt. I feel if Mercurial or anything else have won, I would maybe have to learn another tool in 5…

That’s a great point I hadn’t thought of before.

I’m glad there is one clear winner and we’re not in the common position of having 2-3 relevant/semi-relevant choices that you’re frequently asked to switch between depending on which project you’re looking at at the moment.

Git is modern version control, whatever you think of it, and there’s a simplicity to that.

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

#40

Post by tonfa »

idank wrote: post #14

Anyone know what Matt Mackall is up to these days? He started Mercurial and got people involved early on with a lot of enthusiasm, you could tell he cared about what he created and the people who joined him ("hg crew"). I learned a lot from him on how to think like an engineer and saw him manage different personalities in the project in a kind and sincere way (I think this was around ~2010).

+1 I learned so much about software engineering (Software design, network protocol incl how to handle backward compat in sane ways, ...) thanks to the mercurial community.
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