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Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

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Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#31

Post by androsynth89 »

jheriko wrote: post #14

i am worried about the popularity of git to be honest. i'm convinced it is popular rather than good. "I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. " I find it hard to understand what this means, but this is typical of the arguments i see for using git. really the core concepts of DVCS are the same no matter what tool you use,…

You'll note that the Jenkins guys were able to recover all their work. They also use a non-standard branching and access model.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#32

Post by jlgreco »

nbouscal wrote: post #29
jheriko wrote: post #14

i am worried about the popularity of git to be honest. i'm convinced it is popular rather than good. "I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. " I find it hard to understand what this means, but this is typical of the arguments i see for using git. really the core concepts of DVCS are the same no matter what tool you use,…

If your comment gets downvoted, it's much more likely to be because it is simply inaccurate. Git is remarkably safe out of the box. Git makes it damn near impossible to lose anything other than intentionally. No matter if you rebase, reset --hard, or any other "destructive" operation, you can always get back to your prior state with nothing but a quick look in the reflog. Even if you start doing the really dangerous…

To my knowledge, reflog won't help you get back uncommitted work that you nuked with git-reset --hard.

Of course --hard is not on by default so... there is no issue here with git's default behaviour.

> "Git's model is remarkably simple, and that simplicity is the source of many of its benefits. Every other VCS out there is more complex."

Yup, exactly. The simplicity of git's model is hugely important. It allows me to not only know what git will or will not allow me to do (knowledge that in other systems is acquired by studying the docs for each particular command to see what all the flags do) but also lets me figure out what sort of novel operations are possible if I am willing to write a little code of my own.

Example: Update hook that only allows a push if two or more colleagues of the committer have pushed annotations for that commit already? With little more than my knowledge of git's data model, and what update hooks are in the first place, I know that can be done and I know how I could do it.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#33

Post by ggchappell »

Articles like this worry me a lot.

Most of this post leaves me thinking, "Why should I be worrying about things like this?" A fair amount of it leaves me at least somewhat boggled; I suspect I'm not alone here. The idea that a user of a DVCS needs to be familiar with issues like these tells me that something is seriously wrong with the design of DVCSs.

Remember, a DVCS is a tool we use to track and store data related to a project. The project is what we are interested in: the Python or C++ or LaTeX or whatever. Git, Mercurial, etc. are just there to help us keep track of the real work. Time spent dealing with the intricacies of Git is time not spent on the primary task -- the thing that Git is supposed to help us with.

Consider filesystems, which are also tools used to manage stored data. If I'm writing some Python thing, I don't proclaim to everyone that I'm storing my work on a ReiserFS volume, and I'm thrilled by the fact that ReiserFS indexes its metadata using a B+ Tree. I just store my data.

I think a well-designed DVCS would be thought of in much the same way. Clearly, current DVCSs aren't. Something is very much amiss, folks.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#34

Post by taspeotis »

rallison wrote: post #10
weaksauce wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not too bad in git. you just look at the merge conflict markers in each of the files specified, delete or merge what you want in each of the files, then add the changes to the staging area, and commit again to complete the merge. this might help: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7589612 and this: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and...

Even better, one can specify a mergetool in their config, and use a standard diff tool to resolve conflicts.

At work, my Git repos are exclusively C# and I've been using SemanticMerge [1] for resolving conflicts to good effect.

[1] https://www.semanticmerge.com/

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#35

Post by fennecfoxen »

jlgreco wrote: post #32
nbouscal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your comment gets downvoted, it's much more likely to be because it is simply inaccurate. Git is remarkably safe out of the box. Git makes it damn near impossible to lose anything other than intentionally. No matter if you rebase, reset --hard, or any other "destructive" operation, you can always get back to your prior state with nothing but a quick look in the reflog. Even if you start doing the really dangerous…

To my knowledge, reflog won't help you get back uncommitted work that you nuked with git-reset --hard. Of course --hard is not on by default so... there is no issue here with git's default behaviour. > "Git's model is remarkably simple, and that simplicity is the source of many of its benefits. Every other VCS out there is more complex." Yup, exactly. The simplicity of git's model is hugely important. It allows me to…

I'd recommend learning "git reset --keep" instead of --hard because of this reason.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#36

Post by matwood »

tracker1 wrote: post #2

I really appreciated that this response was not overbearing, or just raw opinion, and rather compared many of the similarities and differences from mercurial to git, and how they approach similar issues differently. Honestly, I've struggled in moving from SVN/TFS to GIT, but it's been worthwhile.. having local branching, and being able to work locally is great. I can't really compare this to hg, as I haven't worked w…

My normal workflow with git is through the cli. Cli really is the best way to use it since git is good at prodding you along to do the right thing. Make sure to go find a good set of aliases and turn on git prompt.

When I need to look at histories or large change sets I'll open up SourceTree or go to the BitBucket repos. If I need to see the file history of a single file gitk -p -- file is the quickest way that I have found.

I'm currently dealing with 2 projects that are similar and share code but are in different repos. Git has made it easy to add remotes to each project and cherry pick commits that need to be shared. As someone who started with VSS years ago, Git continues to amaze me with how easy it makes source wrangling.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#37

Post by migrantgeek »

ggchappell wrote: post #33

Articles like this worry me a lot. Most of this post leaves me thinking, "Why should I be worrying about things like this?" A fair amount of it leaves me at least somewhat boggled; I suspect I'm not alone here. The idea that a user of a DVCS needs to be familiar with issues like these tells me that something is seriously wrong with the design of DVCSs. Remember, a DVCS is a tool we use to track and store data related…

If you're just storing data, your analogy is fine.

It breaks down with more advanced usage like integrations which can be very difficult with large teams.

I manage a VCS with thousands of developers committing to a large code base. The VC system starts to really matter and you have to understand how it handles things like conflict resolution or things can get out of hand really quickly.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#38

Post by jlgreco »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #35
jlgreco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my knowledge, reflog won't help you get back uncommitted work that you nuked with git-reset --hard. Of course --hard is not on by default so... there is no issue here with git's default behaviour. > "Git's model is remarkably simple, and that simplicity is the source of many of its benefits. Every other VCS out there is more complex." Yup, exactly. The simplicity of git's model is hugely important. It allows me to…

I'd recommend learning "git reset --keep" instead of --hard because of this reason.

Certainly. --hard should only be used if you actually want what --hard provides.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#39

Post by kasey_junk »

lotyrin wrote: post #26
jheriko wrote: post #14

i am worried about the popularity of git to be honest. i'm convinced it is popular rather than good. "I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. " I find it hard to understand what this means, but this is typical of the arguments i see for using git. really the core concepts of DVCS are the same no matter what tool you use,…

As far as danger goes, I've never got into a state I couldn't back out of using the reflog - though the user experience surrounding getting there and back could definitely use some polishing. As far as having mutable histories, from the standpoint of someone who has to review and integrate lots of branches from a large distributed team, its amounts to a necessary evil. It's difficult to review and merge anything more…

"from the standpoint of someone who has to review and integrate lots of branches from a large distributed team"

I think this is a very telling point. I found git infuriating and inconsistent to an irresponsible degree, until I realized it wasn't built for me as a producer of code. It was built for people who have to integrate lots of code from lots of disparate producers. Once that lightbulb clicked a lot of things started to make more sense.

I still find git infuriating as part of my daily development workflow, but at least I get it now. I still have a hard time recommending it for small teams that are doing on the fly integration, but for the big distributed team model, I could see it being the best choice.

Re: Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

#40

Post by gkoberger »

ggchappell wrote: post #33

Articles like this worry me a lot. Most of this post leaves me thinking, "Why should I be worrying about things like this?" A fair amount of it leaves me at least somewhat boggled; I suspect I'm not alone here. The idea that a user of a DVCS needs to be familiar with issues like these tells me that something is seriously wrong with the design of DVCSs. Remember, a DVCS is a tool we use to track and store data related…

Taking your logic a bit further: the final product is what we (should be) interested in. Python or C++ or LaTeX or whatever are just to help us make it. Everything else, whether it be Python or git or C++ or Mecurial or vim or Windows or an ergonomical mouse, is just there to help us make the final product in an easy and quality manner.

I don't see a problem with worrying about git any more than I see one with worrying about Python. Change for the sake of change is bad, but change for the sake of an improved workflow is good.

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