81–90 of 263 posts
In my time with it, about ~20 years ago, it had a lot of nice features for instance hg came with a web server/interface out of the box.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mercurial wasn't the better technology, though. The UX is almost the same as git, diverging in ways that are arguably worse, but the tools were written in much slower Python (initially, and for many years after).
How do you consider the UX "nearly identical" or "arguably worse"? The Mercurial CLI has clear, well named commands that are predictable and easy to memorize. hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively. The Git CLI requires you to understand its internal data structures to understand the difference between a rebase and a merge, a…
The core concept is similar -- history is a stream of content-addressed commits. Concepts map almost 1:1. git does some things arguably better.
> hg histedit is clean and easy to use and visually shows you what is going to happen - what the new order will be - nondestructively.
hg histedit is basically identical to git rebase -i. The names are different, but the operations end up being more or less the same. hg amend -> git commit --amend. Graft -> cherry-pick.
> I've worked with Mercurial for 5+ years and no one on my team has ever given up on a client and done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.
I don't know what to tell you. I've also worked with Mercurial for 5+ years, but I've never rm -rf'd a git repo.
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…
Mercurial is one of the many sad stories of far better technology being forgotten by the popularity contest juggernaut of something else. I still use mercurial for all my personal project where I don't need to care what anyone else thinks. It is pleasant to use good tools, just like I like to buy top quality rachets or such.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate that social factors like popularity are a thing in technical decisions. I have not used mercurial (though heard good things about it) but I saw a similar thing play out in Rust gamedev. There are 2 competing game engines, one better technically, the other much more popular. Now, if everyone made a purely technical decision, they'd pick the first one and eventually it would become the more popular one. Unfortun…
FWIW you can still have a staging-area-like workflow with JJ - it's just that while git has "commits", "the staging area", "the working directory", and "stashes" as four separate concepts with four separate toolkits, in JJ all of those things are "commits" and a single toolkit works with all of them :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mercurial is one of the many sad stories of far better technology being forgotten by the popularity contest juggernaut of something else. I still use mercurial for all my personal project where I don't need to care what anyone else thinks. It is pleasant to use good tools, just like I like to buy top quality rachets or such.
Mercurial wasn't the better technology, though. The UX is almost the same as git, diverging in ways that are arguably worse, but the tools were written in much slower Python (initially, and for many years after).
I've used git and mercurial for roughly the same amount of time.
Your statement is, frankly, something that makes me question your sanity. They're not remotely similar. Outside of something like Perforce, I've not used a VCS with a worse UI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Finally, in one team, I more or less forced a senior engineer use merge (or rather, I was in control of the project and did not force other developers to use rebase). After a year, he admitted that he no longer really saw a benefit in rebase and switched to just using merges in his own projects. He also noticed fewer merge conflicts this way.
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…
Prior and post that I'd always used git but I'll always have a bit of a soft spot for mercurial, especially as our forge usage at the time predated strict guardrails and controls - we did code review, but it was your responsibility to tag the appropriate people and wait for them to respond, if you felt it was necessary to merge prior to that you could - but better be ready to defend that decision.